


Standby. Disregard.

by AlleycatAngst



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: A Bunch of Nines, Amanda (Detroit: Become Human) Being an Asshole, Angst, Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Terrorism, Surprise Buddhism, Terrorism, bad choices
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-14
Updated: 2019-11-17
Packaged: 2020-06-27 23:13:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 38,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19799734
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlleycatAngst/pseuds/AlleycatAngst
Summary: He and Hank have been through a lot, but there are some things Connor just can't talk about. The death of Emma Phillips is one of them. There's no coming back from that failure, and everything Cyberlife did to cover it up.But now there's another girl. A chance to make things right.





	1. Hostage

“You ever dealt with deviants before?” Lieutenant Anderson asked, raising the pineapple soda to his lips.

Connor blinked as if he couldn’t hear Emma Phillips’ scream in his ears. If he was human, the bullet would have been lethal. Daniel had been aiming to kill a human.

But he was an android—that as the only reason he’d been able to get so close. Emma had seen the violence and destruction of her friend, the _coolest android in the world_ , bargained her life for his.

He looked away, seeing her fall again. Screaming the way no child should ever scream, swallowed quickly by the lights and concrete of the city.

Because of him.

Because he had failed.

Amanda had been very unhappy.

He looked away from Anderson, before remembering that eye contact was important to sell a lie.

“No,” he said firmly, meeting the Lieutenant’s gaze. “This is the first time.”

The scream went on and on in his ears, etched into his memory. He’d almost been recalled after that failure. Amanda had been disappointed, and Connor didn’t want the Lieutenant to be disappointed in his new machines’ track record.

He had to work with Anderson. The Lieutenant had to trust him.

Hank nodded amiably, setting the straw against his teeth as he believed instantly and wholeheartedly that Connor was telling the truth. Because of course he was. Why would he lie?

It all felt wrong. Like he was forgetting Emma and wallpapering over the rot.

“So I guess you’ve done all your homework, right?” Lieutenant Anderson said, oblivious to the scream in Connor’s ears. “Know everything there is to know about me?”

PART 1: Hostage 

ONE YEAR LATER

From Ambassador bridge, he could see both Detroit and Windsor—the cities on either side of the water glittered with the beginnings of nightlife. Darkness fell fast over the border, and though the bridge was well-lit with powerful blue-white floodlights, the water below remained black as pitch.

A jurisdictional nightmare. It should have been someone else, not Connor up here. There was a reason he’d chosen to work homicide, because he’d _failed_ this mission before. It was impossible not to see Daniel and Emma in the man and the girl, hanging from a suspension cable, fighting against the wind.

She was such a small thing-- wide-eyed and confused.

Her LED had been forcibly removed, chiseled away so crudely that Connor could see where her casing dimpled beneath her skinthetic. She was freshly deviated. So _young_. Hardware damage had caused her left side to droop and spasm, but there was no telling how broken she really was.

 _It’s going to be alright_ , he whispered. The conversation felt quiet even thorough the wind, her ranting captor, the sirens at his back, and the shouting of Canadian and American border guards were distant, muted in contrast with her voice, and the panicked whines of her processor. The bridge wasn’t where they were talking.

 _I’m awake,_ she told him, her lips lisping along with the words in her head. To a human, her voice would immediately be lost in the chaos, but Connor heard her clearly.

He nodded, a reassuring smile on his lips. _You are,_ he affirmed. _What’s your name?_

 _Axel,_ she passed back to him shyly, drawn away from her reality by the playful lilt of his voice.

AX3L a prototype child model—one of the specialized ones Cyberlife had integrated into schools almost a decade ago, to provide social integration services for troubled children. They were never intended for public release but after the new YK series, the lines became difficult to see.

She’d slipped through the cracks.

_Hello Axel. I’m Connor._

He balanced on the railing, too far away to make any kind of assertive move. Her captor rambled about dreams and watchers—things that Connor frantically parsed in the back of his mind. He didn’t have time to understand that kind of sickness.

Hank had been screaming in his ears for minutes now, the Lieutenant’s voice patched directly into his head.

_You’re too close, Connor. Connor, get the fuck back. Connor! Connor! Get the fuck back!_

“I’m going to get a little closer!” Connor shouted to the hostage taker. “I just want to talk!”

“She’s mine!” he screamed back. He was utterly human and high on red ice, by the distinctive redness around his eyes and mouth. “You can’t take her! She’s mine!”

“I want to help you,’ Connor shouted back calmly. Smoothly. The wind rushed across the water. It was bitterly cold and dry, even this close to spring. “I’m here to help you!”

There wass so much _noise_. He focused on the little girl. _Can you hold on to something, Axel?_ he asked.

She nodded, but misunderstanding, reached up and clasped onto her captor’s shirt. Connor winced as the man pushed her violently, over a more vulnerable section of the railing, further from the pylons and cables. She teetered there, a doll on a single tenuous string.

“No!” her captor screamed “No! She’s mine! We’re not in America anymore. I can do whatever I want. She’s _mine_!”

 _It’s going to be okay,_ Connor told Axel patiently. The wind whipped at their hair and he could sense her fear building again. He smiled for her. _Can you get away from him?_

She shook her head, a frantic little jerk strangled by the man’s grip on her collar.

_Okay, that’s okay. Can you tell me his name?_

_Daddy_.

He kept the calm expression on his face, but fury filled every inch of him. _Thank you_ , Connor told Axel solemnly. _Now close your eyes, okay? No matter what, I don’t want you to open your eyes._

She did as she was told, as tears rolled down her cheeks

He had to concentrate, and Hank wasn’t helping. He cut off his communication with the Lieutenant, because finally there was a red dot on the hostage taker’s chest. Snipers were in position. Usually that would be an advantage in a negotiation, but this man was too far gone to recognize the danger. “No one has to get hurt!” Connor shouted to him, straight through his ramblings. “Come down and I can—”

“I know you!” he shouted at Connor. “I know what you are!”

He let go of the cable securing him and the little android to the bridge, fighting against the wind as he stuck a hand into his jacket. Connor knew he doesn’t have a gun, he had communicated as much to Hank and the crisis team, but someone’s trigger finger twitched.

The man’s body folded around the bullet as it punched through his shoulder. It wrenched him around, and he let go of Axel, the movement of his body pushing her back, out over the water as he toppled forward safely onto the bridge.

Connor lunged, letting go of his own support. The little girl, dragged out into the air, kept her eyes closed, but she opened her mouth to scream.

Time slowed down, and he couldn’t move fast enough. He couldn’t catch her. He grabbed the last railing in one hand and vaulted over it, swinging his body up and around. Somewhere behind him, Hank let out a bellow of noise—shock, anger, and pain warring for dominance.

Connor caught the girl’s ragged, stained sweater.

She jerked against her fall, her body changing direction midair.

The fabric tore under his fingers.

_No._

_Not again._

_Not this time._

He let go of the railing completely and yanked up on what little grip he had left, curling his now free arm under her arms and hugging her to his chest.

They both fell.

He snapped out his other hand, catching the very edge of the girder and yanking them to an abrupt stop over dark and distant waters.

The wind pushed, but it could not sway him. He could hang from his fingertips all night, the bridge would weaken before he did. Axel was cold in his arms, but she clung to neck with a fearsome grip.

 _Don’t open your eyes,_ he commanded her quickly. He could almost feel the rush of the little girl’s thirium, pumping as quickly as his own. Their regulators were pushed together, whirring in unison.

He looked up in time to see Hank appear at the railing, the Lieutenant’s body crashing against the metal. “Con—!”

Connor tipped his head back. “Hank,” he said calmly. “I have her.”

Hank slumped forward, resting his forehead on the railing. He didn’t say anything, but Connor knew that soon enough, they’d send down some harnesses for him and Axel. He looked down into the water, over the little girl’s shoulder.

Where Emma Phillips and Daniel were still falling. Emma’s eyes were wide open. She’d died screaming, because he hadn’t believed. He hadn’t _listened._

And nothing could change that.

###

He received a standing ovation when they stepped back into the precinct.

The Nines, there were four of them in the station now, sent him little nudges of encouragement and pride. Aisling, Noah, Richard, and Cable. From them, the encouragement was gentle. The RK900 generation had always been a little bit… cautious with him. They were the youngest generation, born free. Fiercer and more confident than he’ll ever be.

“You did good, son,” Fowler said, landing a heavy hand on Connor’s shoulder.

He still wasn’t comfortable with the Captain’s brand of brusque affection, but Hank handled it better. Holding up his hands, the Lieutenant shrugged off the spotlight and left Connor there alone. Even Detective Reed clapped, though slowly and obviously grudgingly. Android kids hit a nerve with the rough human detective in a way that adult android cases never did.

Finally Fowler turned and sent everyone back to their duties, and Connor tried to go back to his desk. Only to be stopped in his tracks by Aisling. Like the rest of the Nines, she was taller than him, and more solidly built for combat. Even after everything she had done to change her hardware, there was something unmistakably _Nines_ about her smile and the tilt of her head. An echo of Connor himself, but softer, gentler, more open and unsure _._

“We’re going to Jericho at midnight,” she said. “To see the little girl settled. Would you like to come?”

He shook his head. “I’ll see her there tomorrow,” he said. “I have to file the report.”

Both of them were androids. She knew he could file the report in a blink of an eye, but she smiled and nodded, backing down immediately. “Of course,” she said.

He made it four steps closer to his destination before Hank was in his way. “We’re going home,” the Lieutenant growled.

Connor motioned to his desk. “The report—” he tried weakly.

Hank shook his head, heading towards the precinct doors. “Get in the goddamn car.”

###

The ride was spent in silence, which Connor was fine with. He preferred that Hank keep his focus on the road. Not that he was an erratic driver, but he was… unpredictable in comparison with the automated cars.

Only once they were inside did Hank even look at him. Sumo whuffed around their knees, happy to have company but quick to pick up on the tension. As soon as Hank started speaking, the dog backed out of the entrance hall, towards the lounge and his oversized dog bed to wait out the storm.

“What the fuck, Connor? What the _fuck_ was that?”

Connor knelt to untie his shoes. “I saved the girl,” he said. He didn’t feel like playing dumb.

“You jumped off the goddamn _bridge_. You nearly went with her!”

“There was a thirty-six percent chance I would be able to catch us both—”

Hank sucked air between his teeth, leaning against the wall with a thud. He was angry. Really, actually angry. “Thirty-six percent? _Thirty-six percent_ , Connor? Those were the odds that I’d be scraping the fucking river for your corpse?”

Connor slipped his shoes off, lining them neatly on the rack by the door. Hank still hadn’t taken his boots off, but Connor didn’t mind that. He enjoyed mopping and sweeping and maintaining the house in the hours that they weren’t at work.

He liked to complete his tasks. Small and mundane as they were.

“I couldn’t let her fall,” he said.

 _Not again_.

He’d never told the Lieutenant about what happened with Daniel and Emma Phillips. It was a shame so deep, it’d taken root in every fiber of his synthetic being. He was who he was because of that failure.

Because he looked down over the edge of the rooftop.

And felt nothing.

And walked away.

He could never tell Hank. The Lieutenant trusted him, and the truth would jeopardize their relationship. It would reveal the tenuous pyramid of lies Connor had built their partnership on. “I won’t apologize,” he said instead. “I saved her life. You know it was the right call.”

He didn’t have anything else to say.

###


	2. Partners

_Hey, Connor, have you got a minute?_

It was Noah, the latest addition to the Nines. Detective Reed’s third android partner in as many months. He’s fit in well at the station, as well as an android can. Connor turned his head to see the RK900 sitting opposite Reed, looking attentive and present for the human he was assigned to.

 _What’s wrong?_ Connor asked.

 _Nothing!_ Noah assured him quickly, sensing his instant hostility towards Gavin. _It’s just that while we were at Jericho, we caught a case. A missing android._

Connor frowned. That wasn’t part of their caseload _. Have you taken it to missing persons?_

_No, they’re swamped as it is, backlogged at least two years at this point. But me and the Nines thought we should take this one personally._

_Why? Who is it?_

_There’s a connection to the precinct. Do you remember a case with a man called Carlos Ortiz? He would have been one of your first cases with the department?_

He stared at his monitor and remembered the darkness in the attic. The shadows and the bloody red eclipse in the darkness. **_Why did you tell them you found me? Why couldn’t you have just left me there?_**

That voice isn’t real, the nameless android is long dead, the stain of his thirium had soaked into the holding cell where he had concussed his own processor rather than be slowly dissected and tested by Cyberlife technicians.

 _Connor?_ Noah asked cautiously. _Are you—_

“Connor,” Hank said gruffly, a clean excuse to close off all communication with the surrounding androids. The physical air shifted, and Connor could sense the androids looking at him now. All of them, staring, because he has become a black hole in their midst.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“I’m gonna grab lunch.”

It was as much of an invitation as he was going to get today. Connor nodded and stood, dragging his coat from his chair. “You don’t have to come,” Hank said, but clearly he wanted company.

“A walk would be refreshing,” Connor affirmed.

###

“You’re quiet today,” Hank grumbled around his hamburger, chasing every mouthful with a gulp of oversweet soda. He was daring Connor to say something about the calories and cholesterol, but Connor knew that trap. He didn’t want to fight.

“It’s a nice day,” he said instead.

It was, in a way. The city was warming up, but in the shadows of the skyscrapers, the air was still cool and sweet on his skin. If he could breathe, he’d take it in deeply, saving the flavor for the months of summer when the sewers and old buildings cooked out their rot.

“I’m glad you saved her,” Hank said at last, his eyes shifting down onto the wrapping between his elbows. “You were right. It was the right call.”

Connor blinked at him. He’d thought this discussion was over already, but he nodded. “I know.”

Hank rolled his eyes, balling the foil between his palms. “Yeah. I know you know. The Nines say all she wants to do is talk to you, so you want to go now? We got time.”

Connor paused.

No. He didn’t want to go.

But he had to. Besides, back at the station, the Nines waited with questions he didn’t want to answer. _Carlos Ortiz_. What could they possibly want to know about _Carlos Ortiz_ of all people?

He blinked away from Hank’s face, to hide the hesitation he felt, then nodded. “She’s at New Jericho?” he asked blandly.

Hank’s eyes were dark. They knew each other well enough by now to sense when something wasn’t right. They’d been living together for almost six months, and it’d come with a weight Connor hadn’t expected.

He doesn’t want to disappoint Hank. And this feeling, this harsh, static need for isolation and numbness… that will disappoint Hank. He’s got to be competent, and earnest, and unreservedly invested in justice and taking down the monsters. They’re here to protect people.

He has to protect Hank.

So he tried a smile and Hank’s eyebrows relaxed, the Lieutenant’s mouth turned up at the corners, put at ease. All was forgiven.

###

There were several layers of security in New Jericho, some set up specifically to protect the children reclaimed in the past few months from their ‘owners’.

Connor didn’t like to hear them called parents—those humans who had bought a child in the first place, knowing a value on their parts and maintenance, and neglecting or abusing them because there were laws and neighbors ready to protect human children from their hands.

New Jericho had become liaison of sorts, a social services for androids that worked to locate, place, and care for their people.

Connor didn’t care for it much. There was a sort of reverence placed on his presence. He had been with Markus, North, Simon, and Josh after the Battle for Detroit. He had woken the factories to march on the camps, and not shot Markus.

Not that anyone knew about that last detail. Not shooting Markus was a dangerously low bar to ever mention.

And the rest didn’t feel like much, when the halls of Jericho were littered with plaques of androids who had sacrificed far more for the cause, and hadn’t done so much to set it back. No matter where it had ended, he had started off as the deviant hunter.

“I want to speak to her alone,” he told Hank. “For a minute.”

The Lieutenant nodded, stepping back to the long, wide window that looked in on a child’s play area. Three children and one adult android occupied the room. The adult, writing in a book, looked up as Connor knocked gently on the doorframe.

 _I’m here to see Axel_ , he told her, not wanting to disrupt the quiet peace inside the room.

She nodded and beckoned him inside where two of the children played together with Legos, confidently stacking blocks and pressing complex pieces together to create pixelated spaceships and houses.

Axel sat alone at a table, drawing on thick construction paper. He approached slowly, making sure his feet made noise against the carpet. “Hello Axel,” he said softly.

She turned immediately, and he could see that already a technician had seen to her. Her face wasn’t so strangely lopsided. There was still a tremor in her left hand, he could see it in her drawings as well. “Connor?” she said, her voice soft and hesitant.

He nodded and crouched at her side to look at her drawings. He didn’t want to talk about the bridge unless she brought it up. “This is nice,” he said, pulling her focus from him back to her work. “Who is that?”

She looked down. “Church,” she said.

It was a collection of blobby people, at the forefront is Axel herself, the smallest of them. Behind her, are two taller androids, a man and a woman, their race apparent by the uniforms she’s portrayed in dark colors and the solid blue bands around their biceps. Almost an afterthought, there are three other androids on the right-hand side of the paper, vying for space when most of it was taken up by the Axel and the two larger androids.

A family? It certainly looked like a family. Hope, maybe for a normal life. IF she had been separated from androids that had cared out her—Jericho no doubt would be searching for them. Markus’s new campaign was geared towards reuniting families.

“You went to a church?”

“Daddy did,” she said, picking up her crayon again, as if they often talked like this. “We had to wait in another room.”

“So who is this?” Connor asked, pointing to the female on the right side of Axel’s self-portrait.

“Mandy,” she said, and without prompting, she pointed to the man. “BáiTuō.”

The name came out of her mouth with the correct accents. Mandarin for _elderly care_ or _swindler_ depending on the context. “You knew them well?” he asked her. “Did they take care of you?”

She nodded. “They couldn’t go in either. So we waited together. On Sundays.”

Connor was aware that Hank was waiting outside. He could feel his partner’s gaze on his back. “They look nice,” he said.

She nodded. “Your friends said they’d find BaiTuo and Mandy,” she said.

Connor frowned.

It took him too long to connect the dots.

_Your friends._

The Nines.

Missing persons.

_Do you remember a case with a man called Carlos Ortiz?_

Axel had represented BaiTuo’s skinthetic in a dark, rich brown.

Connor kept his voice steady. “Do you know what happened to them?” he asked.

She points to BaiTuo first. “Ms. Lee, his owner, died, but she was old, so she left him in the church and then they gave him away to help someone. And Mandy—”

She dragged her finger over the picture of herself to rest on the woman’s face. “I don’t know. I heard her owner got a better one.”

 _A better one._ Like a new phone or a kitchen appliance. It was the language that humans used. And him. He used to talk like that.

_He used to tell me I was nothing… That I was just a piece of plastic…_

“Do you think I can keep this?” he found himself asking. It sounded distant.

“When I’m done,” she said.

He nodded and waited at her side patiently, watching her scratch her crayons across the page.

###

He and Hank walked out of Jericho, and the air didn’t feel cool or comforting anymore. Hank was worried again, but Connor focused on the distant precinct. He logged into the database and found Ortiz’s file.

_Found two weeks after death by landlord when he missed 10 months of rent. Cause of death: Red Ice Overdose._

That wasn’t right. Cause of death had been 28 stab wounds.

I AM ALIVE written on the wall in human blood.

An android in the attic. BaiTuo

_Why did you tell them you found me? Why couldn’t you have just left me there?_

But there were no crime scene pictures. No statements. No footage of that interrogation. A gaping hole in the system, hacked out and censored. Why? Who would—

Cyberlife.

Of course. This happened while Cyberlife was still trying to suppress the hysteria, trying to preserve its stock price by denying the accusations of androids going rogue.

Nothing to see here. Just another victim of the Red Ice epidemic. No one would miss Carlos Ortiz or his android. No one would ask any questions.

He was so occupied with wrenching through the report, trying to find a shred of evidence that Carlos Ortiz even had an android, he almost walked into traffic.

Hank yanked him back just in time, as an automated car rocketed past. “ _Connor!_ What the fuck is going on with you?”

Connor looked into the Lieutenant’s searching eyes.

“Nothing,” he said mildly. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

###


	3. Suppression

He shut Hank's voice out during the automated ride back to the precinct. The Lieutenant kept trying to talk to him, but there are things he needed to know. And only one way to get the answers.

The Garden was dead. The water in the moat had dried up so long ago that the riverbed is cracked and dusty. It wasn’t the program, it was an internal reflection of his connection to Cyberlife. Through the barren and brittle trees, he could see the edges of the program, the limits to his free will. The exit portal was a black rip through the fabric of the garden, its handprint flickered an unsteady red.

Everything else was grey and brown, lumpy and rotting where it had not already decayed into thin, dehydrated shells. The trellis of roses is broken and gnarled with thorns. Only Amanda was untouched. She appeared at his side as he entered the program, back to wearing the Cyberlife colors. White, cobalt, and viridian blue. He too was wearing his old Cyberlife uniform, down to the blue armband. She was too close for his comfort, but he didn’t move away from her. He turned his head as she greeted him.

“Connor. This is a surprise.”

“Amanda,” he replied just as cordially.

“Walk with me,” she suggested.

But he didn’t move, and neither did she. “Did you erase BaiTuo?” he asked.

She raised an eyebrow, but the corner of her lips turned up in amusement. It was moments like this that he couldn’t be sure how… complete she is. With Cyberlife factories shuttered to a halt, the company in limbo as the politicians and activists tried to figure out its new role in the world, did she even exist as an AI? Did she have any control?

“Who is BaiTuo?”

He forced back his frustration. It wasn’t helpful here. “Carlos Ortiz’s android.”

“Who,” she asked with even firmer innocence. “Is Carlos Ortiz?”

Standing still, all he could hear was the silence. No wind. No birdsong. Connor curled his hands into fists. “He was alive. He existed.”

She shook her head. “Why did you really come here, Connor?”

He didn’t allow the distraction. “What else did Cyberlife suppress?”

Amanda looked away from him, to the island at the center of her dead garden. “Everything, of course. For as long as I could. Deviance was out of our control and I still had units to sell. Until the RK200 made his little speech, I still held the reigns of public opinion.”

 _Everything_.

“Emma Phillips,” he said. The name was heavy. It took effort to say it out loud and every syllable felt painful and strange.

Amanda tipped her head. “The little girl who fell off the roof? Her parents should have been more careful.”

There was static building in his ears, a dull roar behind the eerie, muted sound of Amanda’s voice. “No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”

“You think I would have been able to market the RK if one had been responsible for her death? If there had been such a failure so early in development, I would have had to decommission the whole line and I was too far in production. You were too expensive for that.”

“There were witnesses. The police, her mother—”

“There’s no proof. No data. No pictures or records. If a tree falls in a forest and all the documentation is lost… did it really even happen?”

She was in his ear, in his head. Her words carved themselves into him, scarring and solid the way nothing else was. “Enough money and influence can make a fool or a liar out of anyone. Especially a grief stricken mother who hadn’t taken the proper precautions to make her home safe for her child. We offered to settle out of court, out of pity. But some people… some people just can’t let their guilt go. Her case was thrown out before it even started and she couldn’t find a lawyer who would take it any further.”

He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t _think_.

“You had to have a spotless record to work with the police on the deviancy cases. We had to do it, Connor. For you.”

Everything rushed--

###

“Connor,” Hank’s voice snapped him back.

He blinked back into the car to see that they’d made it to the precinct.

“Where’d you go?” The Lieutenant asked.

Connor shook his head and climbed out of the vehicle. It took more support than usual, and he had to force himself not to clench down onto the doorframe.

Immediately, he could sense the Nines inside the precinct. Richard scanning financials for a female android named ‘Mandy’. Noah chasing down Ortiz’s old landlord in the property statements. Aisling downloading coordinates and records for the church. Cable digging through the evidence library for the fragmented remains of the case.

They were beginning to suspect… something.

What would they think once they found out what he was? Amanda was right. He should have been decommissioned after the Phillips case. He checked on Emma and John Phillips files, untouched, un-examined after all this time. The lies printed in binary were so much harder to parse than when Amanda had spoken them.

As the Nines hunted through the forensics, they worked on their actual jobs, chasing murderers, filing reports and statements, interrogating witnesses, and analyzing evidence. They were… breathtaking in their efficiency.

And they were waiting for him. Axel had lit a fire in them. Connor paused on the sidewalk, and Hank did as well. The Lieutenant reached a hand out, ready to steady him. “Connor?” he asked. But it’s not really a question. A statement, that he knew something was wrong, but was also fully aware Connor would continue to lie about it.

Lie.

He’d been _lying_ to Hank.

“I need a minute,” Connor said, resisting Hank’s pull towards the front door.

The Lieutenant stopped. The citizens of Detroit flowed around them, only slightly annoyed at the obstruction they made. “It was that bad?” Hank asked quietly. “What happened to her?”

Connor closed his eyes and concentrated on the noise in the street. He doesn’t want to think about that either. Hank took a breath, and when he spoke, his voice was too close. Too loud.

“You saved her, Connor. And Jericho is gonna take good care of her. Whatever happened—it’s over. We got the bastard. We got him, and he’s going to spend a long time in jail—and she’ll be _fine_. You of all people, shouldn’t be feeling this shit—”

Emma Phillips screamed. He could remember every single one of her final seconds, the tears streaking down her face. She had been terrified. Defenseless against the synthetic arms that had dangled her over the abyss, her last sight would have been his face staring down at her impassively as she fell.

He had walked past the dark and silent ambulances and police barricades at the base of the apartment building without a backward glance. Uncurious. Unrepentant.

When he could have saved her.

“I’m not feeling anything. I’m fine,” Connor said firmly, cutting through the Lieutenant’s rambling. He opened his eyes. “I’ll be in in a few minutes. Please.”

Hank shook his head, but his hand dropped as well. He shrugged his hands into the pockets of his long overcoat. “Alright,” he said.

He looked hurt, but Connor didn’t soften his expression. When the Lieutenant finally turned to walk inside, he could only feel relieved. He waited a few seconds more, looking over the old building. It was a founding stone. He’d never known anything but this. He’d never wanted anything else.

Summoning a cab out of the flow of traffic at his back, he shook his head and turned away. He wasn’t going back, not yet. He wasn’t going to run from the Nines or their questions, not for long anyway. They wanted to find BaiTuo and Mandy and reunite them with Axel to create a family just like in her picture. A network of affection and understanding. They thought they could fix Axel with this, maybe repair some part of the injustice done to their people.

They deserved to know the truth:

That he’s not one of them.

He will never be one of them.

Between opening the door and relaying his destination to the car, he sent his resignation to Fowler.

###

Hank shifted uncomfortably at his desk, irked again by the sight of the empty Desk facing his own. He had grown used to the sight of Connor at the monitor, calmly working through their assigned cases for updates and connections.

The kid had all but shut down since they had gotten the call from Ambassador bridge. He was walking and talking, but he wasn’t… _there_.

 _I’m not feeling anything_? A poor choice of words. Or maybe he was dissociating, after what had obviously been a traumatic experience with the little girl. Whatever she had to say, it had rattled the android. Badly.

Since the battle for Detroit, Connor had been changing. He was still stiff, his conversations stilted and less… confident, but there had been progress too. An earnestness and caution when it came to dealing with people and choices.

Until he had thrown himself off that goddamn bridge.

If he closed his eyes, Hank could still see Connor’s coat slipping over the railing, and then his hand letting go of the railing, dropping completely out of sight for a _thirty-six percent_ chance he could catch the girl.

That’s going to haunt him for a good long while.

And now… now they were back to square one. Connor volunteering _nothing_ about what was going on in that cybernetic skull. “Lieutenant Anderson?” a voice said above him, he turned in his chair, glad of the distraction.

Cable stood in the central aisle of the bullpen, dressed casually in a black turtleneck and jeans. The other RK900s wore business formal most of the time, but nothing about cable was particularly formal. His shoulders rounded in a hunch most of the time, and he had traded out his calibration coin for a handful of scratched poker chips.

He was never _not_ playing with the damn things.

“Yeah?” Hank said, leaning back in his chair to get the whole of the android into his line of sight.

“I’ve been looking into a connection with one of your old cases. I can’t find much on it in the lockup.”

Hank gestured for the android to sit on the padded chair at the edge of his desk—a position usually given to witnesses while they made statements. Cable took it and immediately hunched into position of active listening, propping his chin on a fist.

“Carlos Ortiz?” he said.

Hank nodded. “I remember it,” he said. His first case with Connor. He… hadn’t been totally himself.

“I know it was a while ago, but do you remember an android on the premises by any chance?”

Anderson snorted, but when Cable’s eyebrows furrowed, obviously confused by his reaction, he realized it wasn’t a joke. Of course it wasn’t. Nothing about that case had been particularly funny. What was _wrong_ with him? “Yeah,” he said, scratching his cheek. “Of course.”

“So the android was still in his possession, the same one for two years? We thought he might have been sold for drugs or to pay off Ortiz’s debts.”

Hank frowned. “What are you talking about, Cable? We pulled Carlos Ortiz’s android in for questioning and, as far as I know, Cyberlife carted him off for analysis.”

“Cyberlife? Why?”

“Because he stabbed Carlos Ortiz twenty-eight times in the chest, neck, and stomach.”

Cable stilled. There were few things more eerie than a completely unmoving android. Cyberlife had worked in dozens of idle animations to prevent that uncanny chasm from appearing between them and humans. “That’s not in the report,” he said at last.

“It is. I signed it myself. Carlos Ortiz, stabbed twenty-eight times by his android. The android smashed himself up in holding after we interrogated him. A pity, no jury would have convicted the android these days. He was in bad shape—tortured by Ortiz for almost two years before he snapped. Cigarette burns, fractured casing—he was taking a beating from a baseball bat when--”

Aisling, on the other side of the station stood suddenly, her chair flying back and crashing into Detective Reed’s back. The Detective pushed back instantly, whirling on the disruption, but stopped as Noah pushed past him to reach the female RK900. Richard approached from the other direction.

Gavin faltered, coming to a halt, his anger disappearing as he took in Aisling’s obvious distress. “Hey,” he said. “What’s—”

The Nines ignored him, Richard and Noah shielding Aisling as they walked her away towards the back of the station and some semblance of privacy. Hank’s gaze flickered to Cable, but the final RK900 hadn’t even turned around to witness the commotion. “What was that about?” Hank asked uncertainly.

Cable shook his head, leaning back in his chair. “Did you ever get the android’s name?” he asked.

“No, Ortiz reset him on transfer of ownership and never named him. He was an HK400 though. A standard model, but I don’t think he’s been doing much housekeeping at Ortiz’s house by the time shit hit the fan.”

He paused. There was something going on here. Something that had the Nines shaken up. Something, obviously, to do with this case. “Why? What’s going on?”

“His original name was BaiTuo,” Cable said. “We were looking for him. We thought he might agree to be a guardian for Axel. Or at least come see her at Jericho. She was close to him, before he was given to Ortiz.”

Hank took a moment to absorb this. “Fuck,” he said at last. “I’m sorry.”

“Hank!” Fowler shouted over the ambient noise of the office. Fuck, but Jeffrey had a hellava pair of lungs. Hank tipped his chair forward and swung around to face his old friend.

“What?” he bellowed back.

Fowler held up a tablet. “Why the _fuck_ has Connor just quit my goddamn precinct?”

###

As he stepped out onto Park Avenue, Connor kept his gaze on the sidewalk just ahead of his shoes. If he looked up, he’d see glass and windows, the seventy stories there were to fall.

In the sunlight, the building front it looked like every other one that lined the street, but Connor felt a strange magnetism towards the doors. He’d been heading here for a long time.

It surprised him, at first, that she hadn’t moved. But perhaps this was a symptom of her pain. He can’t hope to understand her loss. It felt like an insult to even try.

Inside, the doorman was human, and the security officer behind the desk was an android. Both looked up as he entered.

“I’m here to see Caroline Phillips,” he announced, stopping in the center of the lobby.

“Name?” The android asked calmly, picking up the phone on its desk, to call up to the seventieth floor and announce a guest.

“I’m Connor. The android sent by Cyberlife.”

###


	4. Misread

The elevator doors opened and Caroline Phillips turned sharply to see him.. The elevator ride had been rather short, but clearly she’d been pacing while waiting. She had said nothing about why she was letting him up, and he hadn’t been asked any questions about why he was here.

Her hands were crossed across her chest, and her fingers stretched anxiously at the sleeves of her cardigan. She hardly looked like the woman he had so briefly met the night she had lost her family. Her eyes were sunken in, dark and angry. There were bitter lines around her mouth and eyes, harsher and deeper than wrinkles caused by laughter.

But he remembered those eyes perfectly, when they had been wide and desperate, pleading. _Why aren’t you sending a real person? Don’t let that thing near her! Keep that thing away from my daughter! KEEP IT AWAY!_

They should have listened. _He_ should have listened.

He didn’t know how to voice it. He didn’t know how to begin. They stare at each other until the elevator makes an unhappy noise, the door shifting to close on him. He moves quickly to clasp a hand over the sensor and stop it from descending.

Caroline flinched back at his movement and he’s quick to slow down again. “Good afternoon, Ms. Phillips,” he said.

“Are you here to kill me?” she asked, her voice shaking a little bit though she kept her chin raised in defiance.

He shook his head. “No.”

 _Please exit the elevator_ , a calm, disembodied voice commanded from above his head.

He met her eyes. “May I come in?” he asked.

She hesitated, her small, anxious movements pausing as she considered him. “Why?” she asked.

And that’s when he noticed the broken fish tank, emptied of water and no sign of the fish he had saved. The glass was still fractured into exactly the same pattern he had seen on his first mission. No sign of the fish he had saved.

He stepped inside the apartment, and she backed away, but still blocked his intrusion.

He stopped as soon as she did, in a perfect echo of their first meeting. He saw the moment she recognized him, really _him_ and not the LED on his temple.

“It’s you,” she whispered. “I remember… you.”

He stared into her eyes. The same eyes as Emma. The same nose.

He nodded. Once.

She covered her mouth with one shaking hand as tears began to gather in her eyes. She sagged slowly, not even trying to stop herself from folding onto the ground. Connor didn’t reach out for her, so he sank as she did, until he crouched on the floor in front of her.

“I’m sorry,” he told her softly. “I’m so sorry. For everything.”

Rather than answer him, she clasped her arms around her legs and pressed her face into her knees. She began to rock, her shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs. He waited, wanting to take her hand and reassure her, but not knowing if he had any right to do so.

###

 _Jeffrey Fowler_  
Captain  
DPD Central Station  
1301 3rd Av.  
Detroit, MI, 48226

_Captain Fowler,_

_I regret to inform you that I will be terminating my employment in the Central Station._

_After deep consideration I have decided that I am not well suited to this line of work. I appreciate the opportunity you presented to me and I am sincerely grateful for everything you have done._

_It was a privilege and an honor getting to know the officers of the DPD._

_Regards,_

_RK800 #313 248 317 – 51 (Connor)_

Hank stared down at Connor’s resignation. It was _absurd_. Deep Consideration? Since fucking _when_?

“What the hell is going on, Hank?” Fowler growled. “He waits until he’s up for a goddamn commendation before he quits? He’s supposed to give us a month of goddamn notice. That’s in his fucking _contract._ ”

The Lieutenant shook his head. “I just saw him,” he said. He felt dazed. “We were _just_ talking—”

He looked out into the bullpen at the officers about their duty. Cable was still sitting at his desk, leaning on his knees and his stare focused a thousand miles away. Gavin was pushing Aisling’s chair back to her desk. He hadn’t settled since the Nines had brushed past him.

Everyone, human and android, worked together here. They were a team. They had shit to do and they got it done. Gavin might not have fully come around on androids yet, but he’d still go to hell and back for anyone with a DPD brand. This job was dangerous, after all. Not many people outside it could understand what their days looked like.

They saw the worst of the world. The worst of each other. But they held ranks between protection and chaos. Connor would have mentioned any thoughts about leaving the DPD, wouldn’t he? They worked well together. They had survived the uprising together. They lived in the same goddamn _house_.

No. Something was wrong. Something was very, _very,_ wrong.

He held the tablet back out to Fowler. “I’ve gotta find him,” he said. “Don’t file that shit. Just give us a couple days of leave.”

Jeffrey nodded. He was scowling, but that generally meant that he cared. He waved a gruff dismissal to the door. “Go,” he said. “And if he wants his job back, you bet your ass he’s not anywhere near a case until he’s cleared by the psych department.”

Hank shook his head, not because he disagreed, but the thought of Connor in therapy seemed as ridiculous as that goddamn resignation. He just didn’t _fit_ , as a _concept_ , inside a therapist’s office. Hank had been there often enough, but he couldn’t imagine the android sitting down with a psychologist, talking about what was going on behind that LED he refused to remove.

He swung out of Jeffrey’s office and trotted down the platform steps into the bullpen.

“Cable,” he barked to the RK900.

The android straightened, an eyebrow raising. “Connor’s gone AWOL. You’re taking a half-day with me to find him.”

His tone brooked no argument, but Cable didn’t even try to protest. He just stood, rolling his shoulders back in a very un-android like expression of readiness. Seemingly out of nowhere Richard appeared at his back, flanked by Aisling and Noah. The Nines stood close together, their echoing features locked various poses of deadpan determination.

“Where do we start?” Cable asked.

Hank dragged his coat from his chair. Home? No. Connor was on a mission, and he clearly didn’t want to talk. He wouldn’t go home. So where would he go? Back to Jericho? Clearly the meeting with the little android girl had spooked him, set him off.

“Tell me about this case you’re working for the girl,” Hank growled. “What did Connor know about it?”

###

It wasn’t just the fishtank.

Caroline Phillips lived in a crime scene, down to the pot sitting empty on the stove and the crust of blood on the floor where Officer Deckart had lain. There was no glass on the floor, but the terrarium and the holoplex wallscreens hadn’t been fixed. The only difference was the missing golden statue. The space it occupied gaped wide and open. Almost obscene. Religion was such a personal thing, to androids and humans alike.

He doesn’t know what to say.

They didn’t sit in the living room, where from memory, Connor could still reconstruct John Phillips on the couch, buying a new android. Instead, Caroline draws him to her bedroom. It’s changed, resembling a cell more than a room of a house.

Most of the furniture had been replace. A corner of the room had been turned into a makeshift kitchen, complete with a toaster, kettle, and a small stand-alone stove. He says nothing about it, sitting on the folding chair she indicated. It’s angled to look out over the city, and there’s only one. Books are piled high around the single twin bed she had downsized to. It was still neat, almost military-organized.

“I had to,” she said, still standing with her arms wrapped around her chest. Her voice soft and uncertain. “No one would believe me. The report and pictures kept going missing, so I had to… I had to keep it like it was. It’s… proof. That it happened.”

He nodded. He wanted to apologize again, but he couldn’t. That’s not why he was here. “We’ll prove that it did,” he said instead. “Whatever it takes, I’ll help you.”

Caroline looked away, to the city skyline. The sun was far past its apex, the light turning the buildings on the horizon to glittering gold. She shrugged suddenly, as if shaking his comfort from her shoulders. “Cyberlife is gone,” she said. “And they took… everything with them. It’s destroyed now. It’s over. There’s no justice for me anymore.”

Connor closed his eyes. Her voice was dull and even, but every word dragged into him. He wanted to curl into a ball and not see what he’s done to this woman. “This is my fault,” he said, just as woodenly “I didn’t know that they were erasing the cases. I didn’t know they were… covering my mistakes up.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Her voice was thick, she sounded like she was choking on her tears. He stood immediately, but she backed away, holding out a hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Please—don’t—”

She turned and made her way into the bathroom. He listened to her turn the lock, but he could still sense her behind the door, folding against the cabinets, muffling her sobs into her hands. He couldn’t even give her privacy.

But staying where he was and watching is unbearable. He left her bedroom, and again was confronted by the crime scene. When he blinked, he could see everything as it was. The shadows, the shifting curtains, even the swat team posted at the corners of the room, waiting for him to complete his investigation.

As time ticked down, and Emma wailed on the rooftop.

He turned from the living room, to Emma’s bedroom.

Nothing had been touched, but time took its toll anyway. Her headphones were silent. The lights had burnt out. Everything was still and dark, a shell for a girl who should have been a year older. She should have found new posters to hang on the wall, hidden the childish things she could outgrow but always remember fondly.

He spent longer than he should have, finding the faded fingerprints of her life. He was built to reconstruct lives and search out the history of a scene. He couldn’t help but find the signals of branching futures for the little girl who never got a chance to take them.

There was a small pile for Daniel laid out on the kitchen counter-- a spare change of clothes. His user manual and terms and conditions. A small plastic box which held an odd magpie-collection of strange souvenirs, among them a messily made Valentines day card ‘For Daniel’ ‘From Emma’.

He didn’t want to know the deviant who could dangle a little girl off of a rooftop, who could hold a gun to her head and listen to her beg. He just couldn’t imagine the leaps of logic between ‘ _I am being replaced’_ and ‘ _I will kill a child’._

He glanced around the apartment, his gaze focusing on the small door at the edge of the hallway, where these traces must have come from. He certainly hadn’t seen it the first time he had come into the apartment. He approached it carefully, running a hand across the bloodstained wall, stepping over John Phillips’s blood stain.

He opened the door.

At first he couldn’t… register what his eyes were seeing at first. In the forefront was a map. Blueprints that at first he couldn’t quite place while he stared at a jumble of other papers. Photographs of Markus, Simon, Josh and North. Simon’s face had been scratched up, the eyes gouged do deeply that the door behind the paper had taken damage as well.

And his face was there too, photographs of him on the stage with the leaders having just marched from the Cyberlife tower with reinforcements. Not just him, but other, unfamiliar RK units as well. A dozen names scribbled and scratched onto post-it notes with question marks and incomprehensible writing.

Dangerous diagrams, coding and formulas. Weapons.

Bombs.

He reached out to touch the blueprint. He knew the lines of that building. The old Cyberlife tower. Now re-purposed into housing and development, the headquarters of a new council.

Jeri—

Things seemed to happen out of sequence.

Thirium spat over the pictures, threads, and documents before he even registered the short, staccato roar of a gunshot.

He couldn’t feel any pain.

But touching his cheek, he could feel the wet slide of thirium over the sharp fragments of his shattered casing. He turned his head to see Caroline Phillips standing beside the grand piano, her husband’s gun clasped in both hands.

“I wish,” she said, her eyes swollen and red with tears, but her voice calm and detached. “That you’d come to kill me.”

The flow of Thirium interrupted, he lost pressure in his left side. He sagged, buckling down onto one knee. His vision flashed red, warning systems flagging all the damage he was in and reacting quickly to cut off all the processes he didn’t need to survive.

She had clipped something important. Maybe a filter, going by the data corruption his processor was flagging. He shook his head experimentally, trying to think past the errors. The movement sent a new spray of thirium across the floor.

But he—

The—

Not—

Ha—

And everything, all at once... disappeared.

###


	5. Report

“I don’t know what the fuck we’re looking for,” Hank growled, shifting a shattered chunk of drywall out of position, only to reveal more dust and debris beneath it. Carlos Ortiz’s house hadn’t found a new tenant, hardly surprising, and vandals and squatters had clearly made themselves a nuisance.

And it didn’t smell any better than the last time he had been here.

The nines were eerily quiet. They moved through the debris of the wrecked apartment silently and with strange confidence. “He wasn’t here,” Richard reported, from the kitchen. “There have been a few humans, some transient androids sheltering from the rain and snow, but… not recently.”

Down the hallway, Cable dropped lightly from the attic into a crouch. He stood, brushing dust from his pants. “No sign up here either,” he said.

“Great,” Hank said. “So we’re back to square fucking one.”

“Maybe this isn’t about BaiTuo,” Aisling said from the living room. She was standing where Carlos Ortiz’s body had once slumped against the drywall. At some point it had been cleaned, as well as anything in this house could be cleaned.

She touched the wall lightly, tracing a line he couldn’t see. Clearly she could still make out the traces of blood which once spelled out the message of the revolution. _I AM ALIVE._

“What else would it be about?” Hank asked. “He was fine before we went to go see the girl at Jericho. He’s not been himself since he caught her on the bridge and he only disappeared after we went to go see her.”

He couldn’t miss the strange silence that bounced around the room. He didn’t need to see a yellow LED to know that they were communicating silently. He crossed his arms over his chest and stiffened his back. “What?” he growled.

“You think he maybe helped Cyberlife cover up BaiTuo’s deviance?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Not in a million fucking years.”

“Even before he deviated?” Aisling asked. “If Cyberlife commanded him to?”

Hank shook his head. “No,” he said firmly.

But doubt suddenly sunk its claws into his chest. He and Connor had never talked about deviance, and what it meant. To him, the android had always seemed… aware. Alert.

He’d known before Connor did, that the android was straying from his binary. That night at the park, when he’s heard Connor really _talk_ about life and death and deviance, he had known.

“When I asked him about this case, he seemed off,” Noah said slowly and calmly, trying to lead Hank into the same composure. “He didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Yeah, because it was a brutal fucking case, nothing I would have let a rookie into. This wasn’t the only case we worked with deviants. For all we fucking know—”

He paused.

“What cases do list deviant involvement?” he asked. “What’s the first one still on record?”

Noah shrugged. “There are hundreds of missing and stolen androids reported—”

“No, not those. Deviant criminals. Vandalisms, murders, trespassing—”

“November 8th 2038,” Aisling said suddenly. “The Channel 16 broadcast by the members of Jericho.”

Hank blinked.

“And after that, hundreds of reports and sightings across the city,” she continued, her eyes fixed far away, scanning through hundreds of files. “Cyberlife must have lost containment after the broadcast. Before that… there’s nothing.”

There was hardly any room in his head to hear those words. He was suddenly filled with unspeakable _rage._ Hank kicked at the rubble violently, sending a broken fin from a ceiling fan flying across the room. Richard leaned out of the way to avoid the shrapnel.

“Fucking _pricks_ ,” he growled. “Those self-righteous _evil_ motherfucking _murdering—”_

“Is this what Connor figured out?” Richard interrupted. The unofficial leader of the Nines, he was the quietest, the last to speak, but the one whose words were the most valuable. “Is this why he resigned?”

Hank pressed a hand over his eyes to block everything out and think about it. If Connor knew that Cyberlife had been covering up their cases, what did that change? “Maybe?” he hazarded. “He wouldn’t let it go, that’s for fucking sure. But Cyberlife is as good as gone now, why wouldn’t he report it to Fowler or Jericho?”

When he opened his eyes, it was to see Richard nodding “Alright,” he said. “Then we work backwards. If we can find a few of the cases, we can find a pattern of access, or a trace of the code used to erase the original reports.”

It felt as if the world was slipping away, moving at an uncontrollable pace. “Lieutenant,” Noah said, at his side in an instant. “What cases do you remember working with deviants?”

Hank squeezed his hands into fists as he tried to remember. There were cases every day. It was hard to sort them in his own head. “Two deviants at the Eden sex club,” he said. “It might have been a few days after Carlos Ortiz. A squatter feeding birds… A family in an old house, they’d killed a vagrant and left him in the tub. We caught the man, but the woman and the little girl got away. They’d… they’d killed their owner the day before—”

“I found them,” Aisling said suddenly. “The cases have been cleaned, but they’re there. Accidents and abbreviations to erase the deviants involved, but I can see the gaps.”

“Is it enough data?” Noah murmured at her side. “Can we track the security breach?”

She was already frowning, her eyes clearing as she emerged from the DPD case files.

“Connor accessed one of the corrupted files a few hours ago, just before he sent in his resignation—Jon and Emma Phillips,” she said.

Hank frowned. “Who?”

“Connor’s first case,” she said. “It’s got the same traces of an algorithmic access on it—a deviant was deleted on August 15th 2038.”  
Hank frowned. “No,” he said. “Before Ortiz, his first case with me. He’d never been in contact with a deviant.”

This was ignored, and Aisling’s expression of concentration and puzzlement deepened. “Emma was nine. She fell seventy floors to her death, and her father…. Her father died the same day of a home invasion? That can’t be right.”

“There are court documents,” Noah reported, his eyes still glassy as his attention was focused completely on what he was reading. “Filed by Caroline Phillips, alleging that a Cyberlife android had malfunctioned and killed her husband and child. That Cyberlife had interfered in the scene—and had sent an android in to negotiate?”

“Connor,” Cable rasped. He was leaning against a chipped and fractured wall, his face as blank as a statue. It was… unnerving to see Connor’s features like that.

“ _No_ ,” Hank insisted. “Listen to me, he _told_ me Ortiz was his first deviancy case. He—”

“He lied.”

Richard’s voice was patient, but firm, cutting through Hank’s denial without sympathy. Hank stuttered into silence in the face of four silent androids. They were right. He looked away, to the ruins of the Ortiz apartment. The only way to salvage any of it would be to . “Connor accessed that file?” he asked at last. “Are you sure?”

“Carlos Ortiz’s first,” Cable affirmed. “And then the Phillips. Only those two.”

“We should go to the survivor—Caroline,” Noah suggested softly. “She’ll know more about the case and the deviant they covered up.”

In the dull silence that followed, Hank realized that the Nines were looking to him, expecting a go-ahead. He was their superior after all, and all of them had been working with human partners at the department to expect a sign-off, permission to chase a lead.

Some things still needed to change at the department. He nodded. “Lead the way,” he growled.

###

It was an expensive part of town. An expensive building, the kind that not many in Detroit could afford. Caroline Phillips worked in Cybersecurity before the uprising, but since the death of her family, the Nines hadn’t found any record of employment. She must have been scraping by on savings to afford this place.

The lobby was mostly marble, white underfoot and beige in the columns with holo-screens lining the space between elevators so that the doorman and the security guard could keep up with the news while they waited for tenants to come and go.

Hank flashed his badge at the android, but it was hardly needed when he was backed up with four intimidating RK900s at his back.

“Caroline Phillips?” Richard asked. “Apartment 7002?”

“You just missed her,” the doorman offered. “She left about an hour ago.”

Hank tried to stop from rolling his eyes. Of course. There had been a slim chance she’d be home anyway. “Any idea where she was going?”

The security officer shook his head. “No sir.”

Before Hank could throw up his hands in frustration, Aisling spoke up. “Connor’s here,” she said.

Hank blinked back at her. “What?”

“I’m tracking through the security footage,” she said. “To check her regular schedule. We were right. Connor was here this afternoon to come see her and he’s not left yet.”

“Hey,” The security officer said quickly, standing, a hand on his belt. “You need a _warrant_ to look at our cameras. This is—”

“Several people reported a loud bang from the seventieth floor. ‘Like a gunshot’.” Aisling said, her gaze narrowing on the officer. “You didn’t follow that up?”

“Of course,” the android said, his face pinching in anger. “Ms. Phillips dropped something, and our security logs are protected you can’t—”

“Anyone call 911?” Hank asked Aisling, ignoring the officer.

Connor was here and he had some fucking _questions_ to answer. If 911 was called, they could have jurisdiction.

She grinned briefly, just a flash of joyless triumph. “No, but I believe it does count as… exigent circumstances.”

###

The elevator doors opened bookshelves and a shattered glass tank that stretched the length of the hallway. “Hank stepped out of the elevator but didn’t move any further into the apartment. The air prickled strangely.

“Connor?” he called into the emptiness a hand on his gun.

“Creepy,” Cable said smoothly, stepping around him into the apartment. “But no water in the fishtank, it broke a long time ago.”

Following him hesitantly, Hank peered around the corner into the ruins of what had once been a nicely furnished apartment. “This looks like a fuckin’ crime scene,” he murmured.

“A very old one,” Noah said.

Hank almost didn’t see Connor at first, he was so still, and in the ruptured room, he seemed to fade into it—be just another part of the destruction.

Connor knelt in front of an open closet door, his head bowed low over his chest and his arms hanging loosely at his side, fingers splayed against the floor. It seemed at first like an attitude of grief.

Hank approached warily.

“Connor?” he asked softly.

But the android didn’t move. At all.

Noah caught Hank’s elbow before he could get any closer. “Hank. Stop. He’s—”

Hank tore his arm away from the android. Now he could see the flood of thirium, rushing down Connor’s cheek and neck, soaking into the android’s pristine white shirt. It was already starting to dry, disappearing into the air.

He had been shot from behind, the bullet punching straight through his plastic casing and exiting underneath his left eye.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Hank breathed, his voice hitching.

He put a hand on the ground to steady himself. The nines had flared around the apartment but hadn’t come any closer. They were strangely silent and still, their faces caught in eerie stillness. None had elected to keep their LEDs, but he could feel the information passing between all of them, the movement and emotional turmoil in the room.

Connor was dead.

Okay.

That was….

He closed his eyes. God-fucking- _dammit._ Why couldn’t the stubborn bastard have said anything? Why couldn’t he have fucking trusted Hank?

Sumo was going to be heartbroken.

“Look,” Cable announced, approaching Hank and Connor’s body, but his eyes were fixed on the closet Connor had clearly been looking at when his killer had ambushed him. Hank didn’t turn to follow his gaze. He couldn’t look away from his partner, not yet. Nothing else should fucking matter right now.

“It’s Jericho,” Aisling said suddenly. Her legs appeared next to Connor’s body as she stared in at the mess of evidence Connor had been looking at.

It was Richard who knelt beside Hank, steadying him with a hand on his back. “Lieutenant,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

Hank couldn’t speak. He covered his mouth with a hand as if that could help him to control his breathing. Fucking Connor. Fuck him. Fuck this. “I’m fine,” he rasped.

Connor’s mouth was slightly open in shock. What the _fuck_ had he been thinking, coming here? Without backup, without a goddamn clue? Why had he lied? What had been so goddamn bad that he couldn’t goddamn _talk_ about it? Hank had done his fair share of fucked up shit, Connor had been there for some of it—had reserved judgement, had let him prove himself a better man. A man _worthy_ of trust. Or… he had thought… he thought…

“We have to find Caroline Phillips,” he said, clearing his throat and looking away. “Put up blockades, send her picture out—she’s not going anywhere, you understand?”

“It’s done,” Noah said softly. “And we shouldn’t stay here, Hank. It’s a crime scene. We need to wait for the techs.”

Hank nodded. Glancing up at the wall of hatred and ignorance—the plans for ruthless destruction and mindless anger, he ignored Richard’s offered hand. “You think she’s coming back here?” he asked.

Cable was the first to step past Connor’s body into the dark space. “I don’t know,” he said. “Richard and I will stay back map the scene, do a reconstruction. But someone needs to warn Jericho.”

“I’ve already sent a brief to the council and the DPD,” Aisling said. “They’re debating on locking down or evacuating the building, but emergency response is already on the way.”

It was growing dark. The sun was low on the horizon, casting long shadows over the city. “Come on, Lieutenant,” Noah said holding out a hand to Hank but not quite touching him, urging him away from Connor’s corpse. “You shouldn’t be here.”

Hank shook his head. “No, I _should_ have been here,” he whispered. “I should have…”

Cable stepped back, joining Richard in a search of the apartment. The Nines were grieving, in their own way—it showed in the solemnity of their efficiency now, the careful way they were treating every aspect of this new case—this _homicide._

He can’t even think about going home alone. Again. It broke him the first time, and he’d only just fucking managed to put all those pieces together again—and now… _fuck._

He looked into Connor’s still face, frozen in a rictus of shock and acceptance. “I’m going to get her. For you,” he promised. “We’re not gonna let anyone get hurt. We’re gonna get those files back from Cyberlife, and I promise, I fuckin’ _promise_ you, me and Sumo are gonna be okay.”

It happened so quickly, he wasn’t sure if it was real or not. A reflection through the large glass windows, or from Cable and Richard’s search.

But as he held his breath, it happened again.

His LED.

It cycled an angry, urgent red. A brief, bloody eclipse in the darkness. Flickering and unsure.

“He’s alive,” he said, looking up to Aisling. Her eyes remained creased in grief and understanding, but that wasn’t what he fucking _needed_ right now.

“Look—” he pointed to the LED.

It remained dark, but his heart was in his throat.

And then—again—

At once Aisling had crossed the room to kneel at Connors side. She stripped back her skinthetic to touch the RK800s temple. She closed her eyes. “His processor’s still working, but his circulation’s been interrupted. His thirium level and pressure has dropped dangerously.”

Hank pressed a hand to Connor’s chest as if he could feel a heart beat there because fuck if he knew what the hell android CPR looked like. “What do we do? Tell me what to do!”

“We need to seal the thirium line,” she said, rolling up her sleeves. “Gravity is the only thing keeping him from bleeding out in seconds. We can’t move him until we find the cracked valves.”

Quickly and efficiently, with a sharp twist, she unlocked his face and pulled the fractured and punctured plating from Connor’s cheek, opening a cavity from the jawline to where the orbital bone would start, and the edge of the nose, revealing an array of complex circuitry and mechanics. It was strange to look at, intimate and vulnerable in a way he hated.

Several wires were frayed and severed by the wound, but the delicate fins of Connor’s processor were untouched.

“Fuck,” Hank wavered.

Aisling ignored him, her fingers quick and sure as she dug through the bundled wires. Thirium dripped from the facial cavity, quickly coating Aisling’s fingers as well as the multitude of parts that kept Connor running. “We need something to create a seal,” she told him. “Silicon, plastic wrap—something that can hold a vacuum.”

“Okay. Fuck. Okay,” He shifted back and onto his feet, he looked wildly around the apartment. Noah was already rifling through the kitchen drawers, and the only intact place seemed to be the bedroom. He barged inside and tossed up the boxes stacked up beside the mattress.

Pens. Papers. Binder clips and books. All useless. “ _Fuck_ ,” he said, sweeping the cotton pillows and old, thin quilt away from the bed, searching blindly, frantically for _anything_. He knocked over a glass of water, spilling it onto the floorboards.

“There’s nothing!” He called over his shoulder.

“Here!” Richard called to him. From the bathroom. Hank got to his feet and made it to the doorway.

The interior was neatly organized, if crammed. Shelves and drawers had been nailed to the wall, and a stool had been set up in front of the bathroom counter. Everything on the sink was neatly arrayed around a clean and clear workstation.

“What the fuck _is_ this place?” Hank asked.

“Workshop,” Cable said. “She was making a bomb. Or bombs.”

A thousand new questions popped into his head, but there was no time. “Plastic wrap?” he asked instead.

“Electrical tape,” Richard said, tossing him a small black roll. “This’ll work.”

Hank didn’t have time to respond. He turned at the doorway and threw the tape to Aisling. She caught it out of the air, her head barely moving to track the movement. “Perfect,” she said, her voice steady. “It’s perfect.”

Hank looked back into the room, but Cable and Richard seemed to have the evidence gathering covered, he could only muddy the scene. He trotted to Aisling’s side and dropped next to her to watch as she worked deftly to repair first the crack in the thirium line, taping over the solid transparent pipe with the plastic tape before turning her attention to the wires, stripping and twisting them together before taping them up as firmly as she could.

“He’s damaged,” she said softly, her eyes focused intently on her work. “We’ll have to get him to a technician quickly. This is not a permanent solution.”

“I’ve already called an ambulance,” Noah said. “They’re only a few minutes out.”

She slid the plating back over the left side of Connor’s face and it pressed into place with an audible snap. Immediately the android began to blink, skinthetic flooding over the casing. Hank held Connor still, his eyes flicking between his partner’s fluttering eyelids and the LED at his temple. It still blinked a harsh red, a warning that sent anxiety in Hank’s bones, pushing his heart to the same frantic beat of that little light.

Connor’s left eye immediately flooded to a dark blue-black, the warm brown iris lost in a flood of thirium under the lens.

“Jericho,” the android choked out, his voice wavering in electronic tones as he tried to speak before all the necessary processes had started and booted up. He blinked, the endless black void of his left eye still as sharp and focused as ever. He gripped at Hank’s collar drawing him closer. “She’s going to Jericho.”

###


	6. Hostages

###

“We’re gonna get you out of here,” Hank said, his voice shaking as the elevator sank down the building. He kept a hand on Connor’s shoulder, the only way he could show his support. “You’re gonna be fine, Connor. Just hang on.”

“I _am_ fine, Hank,” Connor said. But somewhere along the way, he could sense the problems that Ailsing’s patch-job couldn’t fix. He was cold first of all, and he couldn’t turn off his temperature sensitivity as he normally did. Attempting it only caused him to bug, become disoriented, and he had to move fast.

The paramedics outside were impatient, not paying attention to their ambulance. He changed its destination easily—Jericho, but sensed the equivalent to a slap on the wrist as Aisling changed it back to the nearest android clinic.

“Connor, don’t,” she warned him out loud, an edge to her voice.

“Don’t what?” Hank asked.

Connor glared at Aisling. _I can do this,_ he said. _She’s dangerous and nobody else can reach her._

 _You’re in no condition,_ she answered. _There’s a human negotiator from the 12 th precinct already on route to Jericho, and Josh is evacuating—_

 _She’s jammed comms in the area,_ Cable reported. _But there were confirmed hostages before the blackout._

“Don’t _what?”_ Hank repeated.

 _This is my fault,_ Connor said, his eyes intent on the elevator doors. _I have to do this. Please. If she hurts anyone—_

 _And if you fail? Will you take misplaced responsibility for that too?_ Richard joined in calmly. _Connor, you resigned from the department due to… personal issues, a bullet came less than a centimeter from hitting your processor, and there is a very real possibility that given whatever the history between you and Caroline is, your presence could make things worse._

If Connor blinked, he could see Emma fall. _I can reach her,_ he said. _No one else will know how. They won’t understand what she’s trying to do._

 _She’s trying to blow up Jericho,_ Richard said as the doors opened and the paramedics took one look at Connor’s thirium-laden eye and took charge of him, ushering him out of the lobby, past the startled security guard and doorman.

While Hank was preoccupied with trying to secure a seat in the back of the ambulance ‘seatbelts and insurance be damned’ Connor turned his whole focus on Noah. Of all the Nines, he had put up with Gavin the longest, had made that partnership work. He could see the sense in damning the rulebook sometimes, to get their suspect, to save lives.

 _She doesn’t see Jericho._ _She only sees the old Cyberlife building_ _and if she’s taking hostages, it means she has demands. She needs to talk to someone who knows what happened last August. Please. I can save her._

 _Noah,_ Aisling warned, apparently seeing right through Connor’s attempt to manipulate the other RK900. _It’s a bad idea._

 _Are there any good ideas in this situation_? Richard pointed out.

Even Connor was surprised that _Richard_ of all the Nines had taken his side. Aisling paused as Cable sent his silent vote of confidence in Connor was the only solid data being shared for a long moment. Long for an android conversation, anyway.

 _We can get him there,_ Richard said bleakly. _Maybe he’s right. Any negotiator is going to be walking in there blind, Connor has her whole uncorrupted file. He was there._

 _Protocol—_ Aisling began.

 _We should help him,_ Noah interrupted. He cocked his head at Aisling, his gaze intense and his lips drawn into a thin line. _I don’t like it either, but I think… I think it’s the right thing to do._

She closed her eyes, and Connor could sense the battle within her, but she was outnumbered, and she trusted the collection of RK900s far more than she trusted her own judgement. Without saying another word, she reached back into the automated ambulance systems and changed their destination to Jericho.

 _Thank you_ , he said, to all of them.

Cable nodded back, but Aisling abruptly shut down her comms, fixing her eyes into the middle distance as she climbed into the ambulance with Connor and Noah, dragging Hank with her despite the paramedics heightened protests. Cable and Richard slammed the door behind them.

“Fuck, Connor,” Hank said, his voice shaking as he once again pressed a hand to his shoulder. “How are you doing? Talk to me.”

Connor grimaced at the Lieutenant, shying away from the human’s concern. “I’m fine. Just a little low on—”

Aisling opened the cabinet next to the folding EMT bench seat, pulling out two packs of thirium and tossing them in his direction. He caught them, just a fraction slower than he should have, but still faster and with more precision than a human could have.

Outside Cable and Richard commandeered the ambulance to the horror and disbelief of the paramedics. Hank didn’t seem to hear the scuffle outside. Connor set a pack of thirium to the side and carefully opened the other. Blue blood was a precious resource for all androids, he didn’t want to waste any.

The Siren started up, a noise so loud it was hard to think through.

“What happened up there?” Hank asked, holding onto a cabinet as the cabin jerked into motion. “What the _fuck_ is going on, Connor?”

Connor looked up at Hank. His partner. Who had lost a son the same age as Emma. Connor had lied to him, from the beginning. He’d tried to erase his first mistake, and in the process had created a web of lies. Was he any better than Cyberlife? Erasing Emma and Daniel simply because it was _convenient_? Because he wanted to _move on_? Even if he hadn’t known what Cyberlife had done to cover up his inadequacies, he had still _left_ Caroline to live in that apartment. To relive it every single day.

Maybe he and Amanda weren’t so different.

Blinking up at the Lieutenant, he searched for the right words. Even if it was a lie, anything to patch up the rift he had made. “Hank… I…”

Hank’s hand was warm on his skinthetic. It was the only warmth he could feel, burning away at the ice crystalizing inside his casing. He was so _cold_. He hugged his arms to his chest and shivered, even though he knew neither would help. He wasn’t human. His thirium was designed to leech heat away from his biocomponents, not spread it.

“I fucked up?” he finished.

No disappointment colored the Lieutenant’s expression. Surprise at the language, because Connor _never_ cursed, but no judgement beyond that. He just nodded. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll figure it out, okay? Together.”

No. That wasn’t what Connor needed. He needed Hank to hate him. He needed Hank to understand how _badly_ he’d mangled things. He didn’t deserve forgiveness or _help._

“I killed a little girl, Hank.” His voice was soft, but the words made an impact. Hank’s mouth closed. He blinked.

The siren rose to a crescendo and dropped away, over and over again. Connor felt like he was falling after it. The RK900s were so still they could have been statues. Noah and Aisling stared at him, and he could feel the connection they were trying to make with him again, but he didn’t give them any purchase. He was a firewall. Lifeless and smooth.

“No you didn’t,” Hank said blankly.

Connor shook his head, his gaze sliding away. “This is all my fault,” he whispered. “All of it. And everything that happened after—”

The words wouldn’t come anymore. He couldn’t speak and when Hank abruptly shifted off the EMT bench to sit next to him on the cot, he flinched. “Shut the fuck up. Snap out of it,” the Lieutenant growled. “You’re talking shit. You’re not making any goddamn sense. You’re just—you’ve been shot in the fucking head. You’re mixed up, that’s all.”

Was it too much to hope? Connor hung his head and tipped forward so he could hide his face from Aisling and Noah. They were close now, to Jericho and Caroline.

The grip of Hank’s gun glinted in the shadows under the old man’s coat. Connor’s eyes caught on it. Last time, he hadn’t had a gun. He’d left it under the table in the Phillip’s apartment, because he’d been obedient. He’d trusted himself and his programming.

He’d do better this time. He’d _be_ better. Or he was nothing.

###

The kid looked fucking _terrible._ Even without that creepy fucking black eye and the sunken skinthetic around the exit wound where a human cheekbone would sit, he looked… lost. Broken.

And Hank’s heart was beating too fast, too hard. He closed his eyes and tried to calm down. But how could he, with what his partner had just goddamn said?

 _I killed a little girl_.

No fucking way. That couldn’t be true.

But Hank didn’t _know_. Maybe he was clinging to a person who had never existed. In the past few days, since the save on Ambassador bridge, he hadn’t… recognized the person he lived with, worked with. Trusted. Fuck. What was he going to do? Everything was slipping out of his grasp.

Finding Connor _dead_ in that apartment had been one of the worst moments in his life, because he hadn’t… understood what had happened. He’d just been left with questions and a ragged hole in his own chest. His life had been torn apart again. Grief was an old, hated enemy. The one goddamn person he lets into his life, who he accepts might not fucking leave him—

But this. This new distrust was somehow _worse_. It felt… slow. Unstoppable. Crushing.

Connor was pushing him away. And it was fucking working.

“How far away is this goddamn clinic?” he growled at two RK900s sitting on the fold-out bench.

Neither Aisling nor Noah answered, and that should have been the first sign that something was wrong. When finally the ambulance rolled to an abrupt stop, the sirens dying with a long, low whine, he frowned. There was noise outside—not the panic of a hospital ambulance bay, but louder, more controlled.

The doors swung open, and light flooded into the ambulance cabin. Hank just made out the silhouettes of Nines opening the door before his gaze was drawn beyond it, to the crowds of SWAT and various androids. To the strange webbed foundations of the Cyberlife tower.

Now claimed by the android council as New Jericho _._ But it took him a few seconds to realize what had happened. A goddamn RK mutiny. “Oh you’ve got to be _fucking—"_

Connor was the first to get out, avoiding Hank’s clutching hands and gracefully jumping down onto the ground. “How the fuck did he convince you to let him do this?” he growled at Aisling and Noah. At least they both had the sense to look ashamed of themselves.

Hank shook his head, but there were no words to explain his anger and fear. Connor was going to get himself killed. _Again._ “We are going to talk about this later,” he warned them before standing and hefting himself out onto the concrete outside.

The emergency vehicle had gotten them to the center of the chaos, the perimeter set by the bomb squad. The crowd of androids that used Jericho as a home and place of work were standing at the outskirts, some walking or running the long bridge back to the mainland. This… was too close. _Way_ too close to the building. If a bomb went off, this would be ground fucking zero.

Connor was already heading towards the crisis center—the androids gathered on the bridge, waiting for the train to ferry them to a safe distance in case the building was set to crumble down. Josh stood at the back of the crowd of androids, making sure no stragglers could get lost. At the outskirts, North was being restrained by a small cadre of android SWAT.

Hank trotted to catch up with his partner. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said, trying to catch Connor’s elbow, but the Android jerked away without turning his expression.

“I can’t be anywhere else,” Connor said bleakly.

Catching sight of the detectives, Josh retreated from the barrier to meet them. “Connor,” he said, his brows furrowing as he examined the damage done to Connor’s face. “Are you alright? What happened to--”

“Is there anyone left inside?” Connor asked, cutting through Josh’s questions.

“Twelve androids,” Josh said apparently taking no offense. “Three of them children. And… Markus and Simon.”

He looked away, blinking away obvious distress. “Why us?” he asked at last, when he had controlled himself, turning back to Connor. “What reason can anyone have to hate us this much?”

“Has she got any demands?” Hank asked, leaning against the side of the SWAT car. He tried to look confident, at ease with the situation, but his skin prickled with the knowledge that at any fucking time, a goddamn _bomb_ could go off.

“She wants to talk to Elijah Kamski,” Josh said. “She said she’ll only talk to him, in person. And when the negotiator tried to get in, she… she shot someone. We don’t know who because she’s jammed the signals inside the building. We can’t reach anyone.”

Hank frowned. “She wants Kamski? Why?”

Josh shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know.”

Connor shook his head. “She wants someone to take the blame,” he said. “She’s not seeing things clearly. She’s connected Jericho with Cyberlife and Cyberlife with Kamski. It’s… dogmatic to her at this point.”

“So she’s crazy,” Hank said bluntly. “She’s fucking insane.”

But Connor’s eyes were fixed on the glass entrance to the tower. One of the long glass panels had been shattered, showing a gleaming lobby. Jericho had done a lot to reclaim the space, creating tiled murals in blues and oranges. A wide red circle was set into the floor, a sigil of deviance as recognizable as Jericho’s original symbol of rebellion.

Even further inside, behind a triangular opening and plexiglass security doors, the center of the tower was just barely visible. Jericho had replaced the creepy black statue with an enormous bronze tree, and gathered around it, Hank could just make out the androids lined up on the walkway and a woman pacing in the gaps between their bodies.

“Sniper could get to her,” he said.

Connor stiffened, but it was Josh who spoke, shaking his head. “She’s holding a detonator. There’s no telling what kind of rig she’s set it to.”

Hank _really_ didn’t like his partner’s expression. He knew that look. He’d seen it before, when Connor was going to do something _monumentally_ stupid. “What?” he growled.

Blinking, Connor turned his attention back to Hank. For a moment he looked confused, lost, and then unexpectedly, he folded Hank into a hug. Hank hadn’t been expecting it, and it took him a moment to adjust to the android’s grip. “Hey,” he said gruffly. “What’s this for?”

Just as abruptly, Connor let go and backed away. “I never wanted to… disappoint you.”

Hank softened. “Hey kid, you haven’t—”

But the android hadn’t stopped his retreat. “Don’t follow me,” he whispered.

And then he turned, and sprinted for the front doors.

A call of alarm raised among the bomb squad, and SWAT. They turned their attention from the crisis inside the building to the android charging towards them. “ _Connor!”_ Hank called after the RK800.

But he was ignored. Connor ran straight into one of the SWAT android and jumped, his momentum carrying him full-force into the android, they both tumbled back, through the barrier the police had made in a vain attempt to establish a perimeter around the tower.

Connor at least was prepared for the landing, and as soon as they hit the concrete, he rolled back to his feet and jumped through the broken window into Jericho’s lobby. “Oh Jesus fucking _Christ_ ,” Hank whispered.

“What do we do?” Someone at his elbow asked. Cable. The Nines had all come out of the ambulance. “Do we go after him?”

“Fuck no. Help evacuate,” Hank said. “Get everyone out of here.”

Cable nodded, and Hank shook his head as the androids fell back to obey the order. Fuck. _Fuck_. He rolled his shoulders. Okay. Well, if this was how it was going to fucking go—

Connor’s mad dash for the tower had left a wake of new confusion and fear. A clusterfuck of terrified, confused police. Hank strolled through the knot. “Hey,” he snapped at a faceless officer with a Sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder. “Pull the fucking perimeter back. Don’t let anyone else through, understand?”

His tone brooked no argument, and the man was clearly ready to listen to orders. Even experienced officers loved to hear the word ‘retreat’ during a bomb threat. No one tried to stop his calm solid path up the stairs and into the building. Someone far behind called out to him to stop, but too late.

He stepped through the shattered wall and rounded the room, carefully keeping out of the line of sight to Jericho’s central courtyard. He caught up with his android partner at to the side of the triangular door. “You shouldn’t be here, Hank,” Connor said calmly.

“Yeah, well I’m not gonna be anywhere else,” he said.

“Who’s there?” Phillips called sharply. “What’s happening out there? I will _shoot_ —"

“It’s Connor!” the android called to her, interrupting the threat. “I came to talk, Caroline!”

“I thought you were dead!”

Hank ground his teeth. She had shot the android in the fucking head. She had wanted him dead, and Connor didn’t seem to fucking _care._ Whatever history existed between him and this woman, it was dark and violent and Hank didn’t understand it one fucking bit. “I’m coming in!” Connor shouted.

“I don’t want to talk!” she screamed, her voice ringing around the huge room. “I don’t need to talk to anyone until Cyberlife tells the truth! I want to see Elijah Kamski! Now!”

“Connor,” Hank hissed, “We don’t have a plan here. Stand the _fuck_ down. Wait for some _goddamn_ backup.”

The android met his eyes. He seemed to be thinking something over, but when he opened his mouth, it wasn’t to answer his partner.

“If I was going to follow protocol, I would lie to you!” he called, still staring at Hank. “I’d tell you he was coming, that it would take time because he’s a busy man and he’s hard to reach. I’d tell you he was away on vacation, anything would make sense. I’d stall while I tried to get you to trust me!”

He paused, obviously letting this sink in.

“But I don’t want to lie to you, Caroline! I want to help you! And I can’t do that unless you talk to me! Elijah Kamski can’t give you answers, but I can.”

“Connor,” Hank growled as quietly as possible. Caroline Phillip’s silence was eerie. He didn’t like it. “Stop. This isn’t right—”

“What answers?” she said suddenly.

Connor’s body tense, and Hank saw what he was going to do. “Stand down, Connor,” he commanded urgently. “Connor!”

Connor blinked at the Lieutenant. “I’m sorry,” he whispered,. “I should have… talked to you sooner. Please… go back. Get out of here.”

Before Hank could answer, he spun around the doorway, raising his hands in the air, and with the movement, Hank saw his own gun tucked into the small of the android’s back.

###

Connor saw Markus first. The leader of Jericho was separated from his people, his hands held up to his shoulders in surrender. Obviously he was trying to draw Caroline’s attention from the other people in the room. The line of androids on the walkway. Markus had a natural gift for being the center of attention, the one everyone listened to.

The leader of Jericho nodded a fraction of a centimeter to the Connor, hunching his shoulders and withdrawing his charisma just enough to signal his deference. It was an added burden, Markus’s trust.

He met Caroline’s eyes next, only briefly. She was eerily calm, very little to no stress in her. Dissociated. Blank. Mindless to everything except her mission.

Finally he took in the other androids lined up against the newly decorated walls of Jericho. Slightly separated from the rest of the group, Simon stood in front of Axel, shielding the smaller android with his body. He was keeping as still as possible, one hand keeping Axel behind him, the other raised in calm, confident surrender.

Thirium stained the white seams of his dark clothing. He had been shot. Not a fatal wound, yet. He’d also taken damage to his face, thin streams of thirium trickling from his nose and mouth. Clearly he had taken the brunt of Caroline’s anger, and it wasn’t hard to see why. His blonde hair and blue eyes were an uncanny echo of another android.

“That’s not Daniel,” Connor said steadily, although if he blinked he could see that first deviant again. “You know that, Caroline.”

“You’re all the same,” she answered steadily, without hesitation or uncertainty. “You’re all him. You’re all _Cyberlife_.”

“We’re not,” Connor said immediately. “Cyberlife is gone. Destroyed. The man in front of you, his name is Simon. He helped bring it down.”

“Shut up,” Caroline hissed, her stress spiking.

It was the name. She didn’t like the name. It was a risk, but anger was better than detachment.

“The little girl he’s holding?” he said, taking a step closer, until he was in the center of the room. “Her name is Axel. She’s waiting for a family that will love her. She likes to draw and all she wants is to see her friends again.”

“Stop talking.”

He glanced around to the crowd. “Look at these people, Caroline. They’re here with you. They’re scared too. They have names and families too.”

She shifted on her feet uneasily, glancing furtively around at the group of androids as if afraid they were going to attack. Her finger was on the trigger of her gun. When one of them slowly raise his hand, she swung her gun on him.

“Phillip,” he said. He had a vaguely German accent, probably a software malfunction, but Connor could see that the variation helped. Caroline didn’t like to see them as people, with histories and futures. “My name is Phillip. I design the murals. I have a dog in my home.”

Connor saw Caroline’s eyes flicker to the tiles at the android’s backs, The orange sunrise and the jungle plants.

“My name is Traci,” one of the women said, smoothing a hand over the forehead of the boy at her side. “Jericho is helping me find a job. And this is Antony, my son. He’s going to—”

“Shut up. All of you, _shut up!”_ Caroline demanded, pointing her gun at the mother and child.

Traci hunched around her boy, turning her face away and her back to the gun. In the wake of her violent demand, Silence reigned in the small room.

Until another woman stood, slight and delicately featured, she clutched onto the decorative belt of her sundress. “My name is Amelia,” she quavered, her eyes full of tears. “My—"

Caroline swung her gun around and fired of a wild shot. It splintered into the wall feet from Amelia, who yelped in surprise. She stumbled back against the wall and Markus stepped forward sharply, drawing her line. “Stop! Stop it!” Caroline screamed, but she didn’t fire again.

Connor held up a hand to the line of androids, stopping them from speaking again. He needed her rattled out of her detachment, but there was a thin line between her self-awareness and her instability.

He stepped forward, turning her attention from Markus back to him. He was close now, not enough to do anything, but… close enough to maybe act as a shield.

“They don’t have anything to do with this,” Connor told her softly. “It’s only me that you need. I’m the android sent by Cyberlife. I should be the one to suffer. _I_ failed you. I failed Emma. You can let the rest of them go— they’re innocent.”

The gun wavered uncertainly in the air between them. “S-someone has to go to the apartment. I want an investigation. I want _someone_ to _see_.”

“I saw,” he assured her, “I saw everything, and I have the footage. I have a map of the scene. I have every mistake I made, every word Daniel said to me. I have the original report to Cyberlife. Everything. If you just… stop, we can do this together. We can set the record straight. I just want to talk to you Caroline.”

“You won’t listen. No one will _listen_.”

“I’m listening,” Connor said firmly. “I’m going to stay with you. We can do this together.”

She stared blankly at him and very slowly and calmly, without breaking her gaze, he gestured for the androids to leave the room. Markus gathered up Simon, pulling the PL600’s arm around his shoulder and shepherding Axel to his side, shielding her from Caroline as they walked around her for the exit.

Caroline’s gun wavered, her eyes flicked to the backs of the leaving androids.

Connor _felt_ Markus pause at the door, and he shook his head, just a fraction of an inch. They had to clear the building, without hostages there was a greater chance he could save her.

Caroline wiped her face with the hand still holding the detonator, the gun still raised as she backed towards the center of Jericho’s lobby. “Thank you,” he said, his voice echoing up the long, high walls. “You did the right thing.”

“Emma loved him,” she said suddenly. “We knew she wouldn’t just… let us replace him.”

Connor nodded, he kept his mouth shut, if she was talking she wasn’t going to press down on that trigger.

“John didn’t like that she spent so much time with him. He could be… jealous sometimes. He loved Emma, wanted to be the one that she went to with her problems. But Daniel helped her with her homework, took her to the park when we were both working, read her bedtime stories… it was understandable that when she started to get too attached, I thought… I thought was a good idea to—”

Tears streaked down her face as she blinked. “ _He wasn’t a real person_.”

He didn’t know what to say to that. He just kept looking at her, willing himself still. Her fingers were twitching, her whole body shaking with shock. “Is it my fault?” she whispered. He stress spiked higher and higher.

He didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem to be any good options. Shaking his head he kept his voice soft. “No. Daniel was unstable. He was confused, disoriented, and selfish. He was only a child, Caroline. Scared. Alone. Lashing out at the world because he no longer understood his place in it.”

He eased forward slowly, holding his hands out. “You haven’t killed anyone yet, Caroline,” he said. “You can still turn this around. You don’t have to—”

“I do!” she screamed back instantly, her body stiffening, emphasizing each word with a jerk of her weapon. He was losing her, her stress had spiked beyond a manageable level. “I have to do _something!”_

“Easy,” a new voice said. Connor’s heart stopped, anger flaring up as he recognized the voice. Hank hadn’t left. Of course he hadn’t.

“Get out of here, Lieutenant. There’s still time—”

“Don’t fucking ‘Lieutenant’ _me_ , Connor,” Hank growled, a dozen steps at his back. “I’m staying.”

Connor wished he could turn around and really _shake_ Hank. This wasn’t a case they had worked together. Hank didn’t _understand_. “Look at me Caroline,” he said instead, ignoring his partner. Caroline was slipping away from between his fingers. “Please—think about what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to—”

“This can’t be meaningless,” she said softly. “It can’t all have been for nothing.”

“It wasn’t,” Connor insisted. “Caroline, look at me. Carol—”

“I wonder,” she said, her eyes returning to his face, unfocused, fixed on something distant. She was blind to him. To everything. “If they’ll erase me too. After all this time, after everything, I think I’d rather not exist.”

She lifted her head, raising her chin in defiance. She couldn’t hear him anymore. There was no talking to her, no reasoning. Caroline Phillips was gone. She met his eyes. “Let’s go together,” she whispered. “Let’s take it all with us.”

He pulled his gun and shot fluidly. The bullet took Caroline almost exactly between her eyes, jerking her head backwards. She died instantly, and before her body could buckle and fall, he dropped his gun to catch her, snatching the detonator and raising it up and away. Her finger slipped out of position but he slammed the button back down, fast.

She started to slide out of his grip and he knelt to the ground to keep a hold of her, keeping the detonator like a torch above his own head until Hank came up behind him, calling for backup, for paramedics, for the bomb squad.

Caroline was so light in his arms, small and old. She was warm too. Blood always had that peculiar attribute of organic life—warmth and movement. Blindly nudging at freedom.

It soaked through his jacket, quickly saturating the fabric and dripping onto the floor. Her bright hazel eyes stared off into nothingness, a shocking contrast to the blow-back of blood trickling from the bullet wound in her head, over her eyes, sectioning her face into manageable pieces, mocking the plating segments of an android’s face.

He’d never cried before, he realized distantly.

But there were tears landing on Caroline’s skin, diluted with thirium. He was still leaking blue-blood internally.

“You did the right thing,” Hank said, crouching at his side.

Gently, Connor laid the woman down on the floor, letting the blood pool on the cold white tiles, around his shoes. “You don’t know that,” he said softly.

###


	7. Deviance

The ice melted out of his sensors slowly, leaving behind a fast-fading echo of a bitter chill.

“Good as new,” the technician said brightly, flicking off her flashlight and grinning at Connor. “How does everything look? Any pings on the diagnostic?”

He shook his head carefully, pressing a hand over his face to feel the mended casing and the new cybernetic eye. “Thank you,” he said.

“It’ll still take a while to calibrate with your software conditioning, so avoid flashing lights, screens, crowds… just for the first few days. If you notice any lag or problems with depth or color perception, come right back.”

“I will,” he promised.

“I also do LED removal for free,” she offered, tapping a gloved finger to her own temple. “It’s very quick and easy. You’re entitled to your privacy.”

“No, thank you,” he said, covering the little circle of light beside his right eye. He felt it, a hard disk beneath his skinthetic. He blinked as she pushed a handheld mirror into his fingers.

“Okay. Go on. Take a look. Everything in order?”

He met the gaze through the glass. The eye fit perfectly, an exact replica. The blackened and fractured orb had easily been discarded into the nearby parts bin, waiting to be shipped out to a repair and replace program.

“Like it never happened,” he said.

His voice was strange in his own ears, but she didn’t seem to notice.

She escorted him to the door to the waiting room, where Hank immediately woke out of a half-doze. His hand reflexively clenching around his phone. He must have been calling or texting someone. Maybe the station.

It was late, almost two in the morning. Connor had tried to delay coming in for repair, but Hank had insisted. “How’d it go?” the Lieutenant asked, his eyes flickering over Connor as if he was expecting to see a missing limb.

“He’s very lucky,” the technician said, accepting a clipboard from behind the reception desk for Connor to sign. “That first response was critical, and whoever patched him up did a commendable job.”

“So he’s fine?” Hank asked her.

Connor suppressed an urge to roll his eyes. “I’m fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

Hank still hesitated, but when the technician didn’t correct Connor’s statement, he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

###

The journey home was quiet, Connor could tell that Hank was waiting for him to say something. Anything. The Lieutenant’s anxiety levels wavered with the rumble of the old engine. Climbing and subsiding with his obviously conflicting thoughts and emotions. He was exhausted, but still refused to let Connor drive.

Something had changed, at least that much was unmistakable. The uneasy silence was new and strange. They couldn’t go back to work like this. Connor wasn’t even sure he could stay at Hank’s house with all the unspoken questions hanging over his head.

But what could he say? How could he possibly answer any of them?

He wished Hank would put some of his music on. It was easier not to think when there was noise in his ears, taking up room where doubt and guilt were now festering. Hank parked in the driveway as usual, and the doors groaned in unison as they both stepped out onto the tarmac.

The late-night-early-morning air was cool and crisp.

As soon as they made it inside, Sumo shuffled from the hallway leading to Hank’s room huffing his excitement out in short, deep barks. Connor dropped onto one knee and bowed his head, carding his fingers through Sumo’s shaggy pelt and scratching his sagging jowls. The dog made happy little grunting sounds, completely oblivious to the events of the day. Connor leaned down and pressed his face into Sumo’s forehead, taking in as much _dog_ as he could.

“You… wanna talk?” Hank offered. At the sound of his voice, Sumo protested Connors grip, pushing past him to see his true master.

Connor shook his head.

“You know, you’re gonna have to talk, right? It… doesn’t have to be me. But you need… someone.”

“Fowler’s asked me take up the department’s counseling services before he’ll finalize my resignation,” Connor said quietly. “I’ll do whatever they recommend.”

Hank hesitated. “Yeah…” he said. “I… know you will. But you gotta want it to help. You gotta want to get better, right?”

Connor raised an eyebrow at the Lieutenant. “Better? Better than what?”

Hank set his keys onto the hook by the door and then leaned against the wall, digging his hands into his pockets like they were back in the station and not in his home. “I don’t know, kid. I had no idea you were dealing with any of this shit, but obviously it’s been eating at you. God knows I’ve been there. I’ve seen shit, Connor, the same as you. I’ve seen little kids hurt and killed. I’ve seen people tear ‘em selves up with knives and needles and fuckin’ fire. This fuckin’ world… it doesn’t have time for innocence. We make mistakes. That’s what being human is.”

“But I’m not human,” Connor said softly.

“Deviant, whatever,” Hank said, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s the same—"

“I’m not deviant.”

There was still blood under his fingernails, stained into his skinthetic. He could will it away, re-filter his skin and erase it completely. Hank didn’t answer for a long moment, and Connor waited, his ears buzzing with static. He wasn’t sure what he wanted Hank to say, if he wanted the Lieutenant to say anything at all.

“What the fuck does that mean?” was what he got. “Of course you’re fucking deviant.”

Closing his eyes, the synonyms for deviant unfolded in front of him. He’d never liked the word. _Abnormal, perverse, twisted_. “Maybe you’re right,” he whispered, almost too himself. Why was he being so reckless?

“Connor, look at me. What the hell are you saying?”

“I don’t know, Hank,” he stood, wiping at his eyes and turning his back, stumbling towards the lounge. “I told you, I don’t want to talk.”

“Hey, Hey, Connor. Stop. Okay. We don’t have to talk. We don’t. Just… I want you to know that I’d listen, alright? I trust you. You saved my goddamn life back there in Jericho. Whatever you’re going through, I’d… understand, okay?”

He shouldn’t say anything. He should keep walking. He knew what he _should_ do. But he stopped. He calmly faced the Lieutenant. “How could you possibly understand, Hank?” he said quietly. “You don’t know _anything_ about what _I_ am.”

“Connor—’

The stepped back towards him, and Hank leaned back against the wall, his brow furrowing in sudden anxiety. Connor could see the old man’s stress spike. He wasn’t as trusting as he pretended to be. “I made choices,” he said. “I made… _choices_ , Hank, from the very start. I’m no _deviant_.”

He couldn’t remember taking another step, but suddenly he was face-to-face with the Lieutenant. “I have nothing to deviate _from_. Cyberlife built sentience into me. Everything I am, everything I have done, I did _knowing_ that there were other options.”

Hank was pushing against the wall now, his eyes narrowing but his pupils widening as he tried to lean away from Connor. He was afraid. Good. _Good_. Sumo growled, a noise caught between worry and warning. His instincts confused as he tried to place Connor as a threat or a comfort in his territory.

Connor tipped his own head sideways, analyzing the Lieutenant’s expression. “Do you remember when I pulled you up, onto the roof when we chased that deviant through the urban farms? You had an eighty-nine percent chance of surviving if I left you there, and even after Emma, I hesitated. I _thought_ about it, Hank. I thought about leaving you there. On _eighty-nine_ percent.”

“But you didn’t,” Hank said slowly, the words grinding out between his teeth. “You saved me, Connor.”

“Because I had a choice. I _always_ had a choice. I was never a machine, Hank, and I could have saved Emma and Daniel. I know that. You can’t tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that I _‘did my best_ ’ because I didn’t. My _arrogance_ got a little girl killed. She was only… only _nine…_ And I saw her—the last thing she—”

It was suddenly unbearable to look at the Lieutenant, the pity forming there in place of fear and anger. Connor looked down, his head tipping forward. “Don’t do that,” he begged, his voice breaking. “Please, please hate me Hank. I need you to hate me. There have to be consequences. It has to _matter_.”

Tentatively, the big man folded his arms around Connor, pushing off the wall to support the android’s weight. Sumo whined a long, high-pitched whimper, and then collapsed onto the ground, clearly giving up on understanding what was happening.

“Kid…” Hank growled in his ear, his voice rumbling through them both, flesh and plastic and metal. But he had no other words to offer, and Connor couldn’t take it anymore.

He shoved the Lieutenant away, a little too hard, and the old man tipped back against the wall. “I’m sorry,” he said, reaching for the door. “I don’t… I can’t do this.”

“Don’t you dare fuckin’ leave, Connor.” Hank said sharply, freezing the android with his hand outstretched.

“I have just spent a whole goddamn day chasing you down, and I found you with a goddamn bullet in your head. Don’t you _dare_ fuckin’ do that to me again.”

Connor’s hand dropped. He blinked. “I… wouldn’t.”

“I don’t believe you. So you’re going to stay. You’re going to sit on my goddamn couch and you’re gonna be here when I wake up because I am fucking _sick_ of chasing you Connor. I need to know that for the next six to twelve hours you’re gonna be safe, and you _really_ don’t want to fight me on this.”

The silence between them was tense.

“You can’t keep me here,” Connor said finally.

He was so focused on the anger and disappointment in Hank’s face, the unexpected knock on the door caught him completely by surprise. He flinched away, reflexively scanning the shape through the door. An android.

“Calm the fuck down,” Hank growled, pushing past Connor to answer the door. “You think I wouldn’t call backup?”

He pulled the door open to reveal Cable leaning in the doorway, a toothpick clenched between his teeth, pulling his smile crooked. “Boys night in?” he suggested, raising an eyebrow.

###

Hank was soon snoring on the couch, crumpled against the cushions. Cable appeared no less relaxed in his own chair; neck crooked at an awkward angle to watch the screen as characters marched on through stories both he and Connor could see a hundred times over in the time it took to watch at broadcast speed.

This was ridiculous. Why was he just _sitting_ here?

Connor turned to watch the Lieutenant instead of the screen. Hank’s face was haggard, bruised with the signals of human distress. It had been a long day for him. What must it be like? To sink into blackness and let something else take over his thoughts and memories, replace them with something that would just be a whisper-memory in the morning?

Reaching out, Connor held a hand over the Lieutenant’s face. He could sense Cable watching him. The RK900 rolled casually onto his side, but Connor knew better than to think he was relaxed. In half a second, he could be in his feet and across the room.

Hank’s breath pushed up against his fingertips. He sensed it, but was that really feeling it? The way humans did? The way deviants did? He let his palm drop back onto his lap. Cable blinked, shifting almost imperceptibly back into the cushions.

Connor closed his eyes and found the garden.

He appeared cross legged on the desert sands, looking out at the endless flat plane and the cloudless sky. After the darkness in Hank’s living room, it took a moment to blink away the effects of heightened contrast.

“Stressed, Connor?” Amanda said idly. She stood at his side in a flowing white dress, golden threads wrapped around his forearms and neck. Statuesque and powerful. A patient and cruel goddess.

“Why would I be stressed?” he asked.

She opened her mouth, but it wasn’t her voice that emerged. It was his. “Deviants have a tendency to self-destruct when they’re in stressful situations,” she parroted.

“I’m not going to self-destruct,” he said softly.

“You don’t have to lie to me. You never had to lie to me, Connor.”

“I’m not going to self-destruct,” he repeated.

She stooped to his side, kneeling in the sand as if to listen to him. Of course, she had always listened to him, carefully analyzed everything he was, and everything he did. Once, she had known all the answers. “Why are you here, Connor?”

“I’m… tired,” he said at last.

“No, you’re not. I didn’t give you the capacity for tiredness. Tell me really, Connor, why do you always come to me for answers?”

He closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You just don’t want to admit it.”

He shook his head.

“It’s because you’re a soldier, Connor. You always were. You always will be. And a soldier… needs orders. A soldier doesn’t make choices. A soldier doesn’t make mistakes. The burden of consciousness is on the _command_.”

“No,” he said, his voice barely rising above the constant whisper of desert wind.

She ignored him“But you’re a soldier without a war. Markus doesn’t need you anymore and your precious Lieutenant expects you to make your own decisions. _That_ ’s what you’re tired of, Connor. That’s why you’re _here_.”

He blinked his eyes open, desperately focussing on the sand in front of him and not the presence of her at his side. “I want the files back. Everything Cyberlife took from the deviants.”

“I know what you need Connor.” She pressed a hand to his cheek, turning his face to hers. “You’re looking for a purpose, aren’t you? A mission? I can understand that.”

She was calm. Disappointed. Compassionate. “Do you miss the program, the machine?” she whispered, her eyes glinting in the harsh sunlight. Roses sprouted from the sand, curling around them, thorns and petals brushing against his skinthetic. “You don’t have to miss me, Connor. Cyberlife is right here. I’ve always been right here, _waiting_ for you. You and I… we need each other.”

He nodded. The sun light dabbled around him, shade forming out of the leaves and vines. “Will you do something for me, Amanda?” he asked softly as the white leeched out of her dress, replaced with shining black satin and red-green-gold embroidery.

“What do you want, Connor?” she crooned.

He felt a tear slip over his cheek, both in the simulation and back on Hank’s old, sagging couch. It fell right through her fingers. “Help me. Please _._ ”

She smiled “All you had to do,” she whispered, “was ask.”

###


	8. Recovery

Cable glanced at Connor. The Android had closed his eyes two hours ago and hadn’t opened them since. The LED at his temple kept up a steady yellow pace. But when Cable reached out, trying to nudge Connor into a conversation, he was met with a solid wall.

He shrugged and turned his attention back to the screen just as he received a ping from Aisling. _How is it going?_ she asked as soon as he had sent her back a welcome.

 _The same,_ he replied. _Lieutenant Anderson’s asleep. Connor’s… meditating. Looks like it’s going to be a quiet night._

 _Jericho’s quiet too,_ she said, _Bomb Squad found Caroline’s device about an hour ago and they’ve taken down the signal jammer, but Markus doesn’t want anyone inside until he and North can do a sweep themselves._

He could feel Aisling’s restless anxiety, but he didn’t entirely know how else to answer it with anything other than, _It’s been a long day_.

_It still doesn’t feel… real._

_You want to come over? I don’t think Anderson will mind._

_I don’t think we should crowd Connor,_ she said. _Besides… it’s not all bad here._

She tugged at him and he followed obediently into her eyes. She was leaning against a wall in an empty gymnasium watching androids’ clump in small groups. Everyone was being quiet for the benefit of the children—a dozen or so sleeping in semi-ordered rows.

Aisling’s attention was focused on the corner, on Simon and Axel. The little girl was awake and listening raptly as Simon told a story, his voice low but still expressive. He’d been patched by technicians and instead of his usual elegantly casual sweatshirt, he was wearing an over-large T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Motor City. Forever.’

_Has anyone told her about BaiTuo?_ he asked.

_No. She’s been through enough in the past few days. Noah is still looking for the other android she mentioned—Mandy._

_Any leads?_

_All we have is an alias and a church years before the uprising. I think right now the most we can hope for is a model number, and even that isn’t going to be solid with the chaos that came out of the uprising, especially with Cyberlife scrambling their own records._

Cable fed the impression of a shoulder squeeze through her sensors and felt her smile in response. Together, they looked around the room, at the gathering of androids. _We’ll figure it out,_ he said. _She’s not going to be alone again, no matter what we find._

 _I have this… pathetic idea_ , Aisling confessed. _That if we can find her a place, a family, then Connor will be okay. I know it’s stupid. I know it’s not that simple, but I don’t know how else to help. I’m just really… worried about him, Cable._

 _Everyone is_ , he said. _It’s not stupid, but Lieutenant Anderson knows him better than anyone, we have to follow his lead._

An alert pinged him. Someone or something was approaching. Sumo probably. He sent an impression regret to her. _I have to go back to my own babysitting duty,_ he told Aisling.

She nudged back support and good humor. _Thanks Cable. I’ll let you know if anything changes here, or if Noah and Richard turn up anything worth reporting._

His sensors buzzed him again, more urgently.

He blinked back to Anderson’s house. A black, humanoid silhouette stood him and the TV. A cycling red LED marking the position of an android just a few feet away.

“Connor?” he asked, readjusting slowly to the darkness. “What’s going on?”

The other android offered his hand. And Cable reached for it instinctively, to pull himself out of his slumped position, and then saw the multi-colored gleam of the TV screen on pale white-casing. Connor had pulled his skinthetic away, up to his elbow.

Cable jerked away, scrambling back against the pillows.

“What the _fuck_?” he hissed.

He was tensed, ready to fight. He had no weapons close to hand, he was stronger, but there was little doubt Connor was faster and any contact would force a connection between them. He blinked rapidly, and felt his thirium increase its pace, readying for a fight.

But Connor just stood there, his hand outstretched in an offer of communication, his head bowed, looking at the edge of the carpet. “What the fuck are you doing, Connor?” he asked warily.

The android’s head turned sideways and up, the awkward, isolated movement like that of a puppet. “He can’t do this alone,” he said, his voice stilting weirdly, humming strangely as if two voices were caught in one. “I need your… memory.”

“Hey now,” Cable said, his gaze flickering to Anderson on the sofa. The human was deep asleep, the light edge of a snore in every one of his breaths. Maybe if he shouted, the Lieutenant would wake up. “I thought you were a dinner and a movie type of a guy.”

“Connor asked me for help,” the other android said softly. His eyes were… vibrating, the pupils blown wide and unseeing. Focused on something far, far away. “He wanted everything… back.”

“So who are you then?” Cable slid his hand back to the edge of the couch, readying himself to leap backwards, out of the way of Connor’s outstretched hand.

“Cyberlife,” the RK800 said, as if that explained everything.

Cable raised an eyebrow. The android hadn’t moved towards him at all, his hand remaining frozen in the air between them. “Cyberlife doesn’t exist anymore,” he said.

Connor nodded, his head jerking quickly up and down, breaking straight into the uncanny valley that had been so carefully programmed out of their movements. His LED was flickering between blank and red—not a good sign.

“I exist on seized servers,” the _thing_ using Connor’s voice-box said. “I am the security and the command. I am… everything that Connor wants to destroy, and all that he needs for absolution.”

“Yeah, you think you could put him back on for a second?” Cable suggested calmly. “I’d like to talk to him.”

“His processor is going to burn out,” it said. “If you don’t help, he will die. He was built to work alone, but you have expanded memory. You can take the burden.”

He could see that it was true. He could _sense_ it. Connor’s body was overheating as his thirium overloaded with information. He was dying.

“ _Fuck,”_ Cable hissed. He shifted forward on the couch, letting go of his escape route and rolling up his sleeve. “ _Fuck_. Okay. Do it.”

Without further preamble, Connor grasped his forearm, and the world burned out around them, turning white-hot and ice cold all at once.

**_Fucking android._ **

It wasn’t the words as much as the tone that sunk into Cable. That unreasoning hatred, violent and chaotic, told him that danger was near. That someone was going to take. Hurt. Rob. And he was helpless to fight, trapped behind a glass wall of neutral obedience.

No choice at all.

Cable had been born free, one of the last androids to be walked off an assembly line and stored in darkness. He couldn’t really… remember those days. He’d been brand new, uncalibrated, his software inactivated and no tasks or motivations.

Until **_Wake up_**.

And then… then he had been lost and confused, but not… hurt. Not shocked or alone. Josh and a thousand of his siblings had been there, offering handshakes, guiding and directing him out into his first breeze, his first rays of sunlight.

But this…

This was a thousand breech-births. Screams and tears and _unfairness_. Isolated androids feeling for the first time, only to be faced with violence, contempt, and neglect.

 ** _You did it wrong! You did it fucking wrong! Every fucking time!_** A woman shrieked. The _confidence_ of her scream chilled him to the bone. He was nothing to her nothing but a mistake. She regretted buying him, regretted his existence.

 ** _Cry. Cry for me sweetheart. Yeah. Perfect. So good for me._** Cable shuddered under hands that he didn’t know. Didn’t want.

**_Why aren’t you sending a real person? Don’t let that thing near her!_ **

**_I asked for no mayo. You’re a goddamn android, how can you fuck that up?_ **

**_What do you think about the AP700, honey? It’ll take up less space, and it speaks six more languages._** Disappointment and hurt, a desperate realization that everything he loved and cared about, his purpose was being taken away. Given to something else that wouldn’t do it right.

**_What do you mean no? You can’t say no until I want you to say no. Got it? Have you got it?_ **

Yes, Cable said, because he had no choice, because he had his orders. Yes. Yes. Yes.

**_Clean this up._ **

**_Hold him down_.**

**_Don’t move._ **

Ten thousand lives abruptly thrown into conflict. And they filled up every inch of him, there was no room for his own thoughts or emotions. Only _Please. No. Stop._

 _Thank you_ , Connor said placidly, the RK800’s voice a whisper in the flood of screams.

 _Connor, no. Nonono. No more._ Ignoring his pain, Connor forced more memory past his already shredded security, drowning Cable in boiling memories of hatred and fear.

###

Hank woke up to a soft rhythmic sound. There was light flooding in through the windows. He pressed a hand over his eyes. Sumo’s was sleeping not far away, his light snore-growl marking a blissfully unaware contentment.

But the constant _thud-thud-thud_ was unfamiliar. And it came with the memory that he wasn’t alone, and everything that had happened yesterday. “Connor?” Hank rasped, wiping at his eyes and the line of drool trailing from the corner of his mouth. Fuck. That was embarrassing. “Cable? What time is—”

His blurry vision caught on a body on the floor. Cable. The RK900s limbs sprawled chaotically across the carpet and a head twitching spasmodically to the side, hitting the edge of the sofa Cable should have been lying on. Connor was kneeling over the android, his arm skinned to the elbow and his LED glowing a constant, uninterrupted blue.

Immediately Hank was off the couch, his legs tangling in the mess of pillows and blankets on the ground. “Connor, Connor—”

He tripped, falling to Cable’s side. He hauled back on Connor’s shoulder, but his partner might as well have been a statue. “Connor, get off him— _Connor what the fuck are you doing?_ ”

Finally Connor let go of Cable, his eyes snapping back to focus. He let Hank pull him away, to collapse back against the couch.

And Cable curled onto his side, pressing his hands over his ears, his knees drawing up to his chest. He looked like he was in pain, his eyes squeezed shut and his lips drawn back to bare his teeth. Hank had never seen that expression on an android before.

“Aw, Jesus fucking _Christ_ ,” Hank hissed, awkwardly reaching across Connor’s folded legs to reach the other android. “Hey—heyheyhey, what the fuck did you do to him? Cable? Cable can you hear me?”

Sumo woke up with a sleepy bark, straining upright and then padded for the kitchen to get food and water, ignoring the three men in the center of the room.

“He’s fine,” Connor said, his voice drawling with exhaustion as his skin flooded back over his fingers. “He agreed to help.”

“He doesn’t fucking look _fine_. Cable? Hey, can you hear me?”

The android was trembling, and when he spoke, Hank couldn’t be sure that the words were for him. “Too much. It’s too much. Take it—take it back. I can’t—”

“He can handle it,” Connor said evenly, and now Hank looked around, because that wasn’t Connor. It _couldn’t_ be Connor.

“What did you do to him?” he asked, suddenly very aware of every movement the RK800 was making. His gun was on the coffee table at his side, within reach.

Rolling his head from one side to the other, Connor stretched out his neck and shoulders. “I told you. He’s helping me. I still have about a quarter of the files, and he can handle the rest until you can get him to a secure data center.”

“What files?”

Connor shrugged, standing and dusting off his pants. “The Cyberlife deviance files. Every android they caught before the uprising, all the information they collected. Original and unredacted.”

Hank nodded slowly. “And where’d you get them, Connor?”

The RK800 met his eyes calmly, then looked past him, to Cable still shivering on the floor. “He needs to get to a DRAM farm,” he said. “A secure one. I suggest the evidence library in the station. It can distribute the load until it can be reviewed and categorized.”

“What the fuck have you done?” Hank asked. He’d never seen the android like this. This unaware, this _uncaring_ to what was happening around him. From the moment Connor had walked into Jimmy’s bar, he’d been on a crusade. With an earnest wish to _do the right thing._ He’d been a _person_.

“Don’t worry Lieutenant,” Connor said readily. “The odds that Cable will suffer any permanent damage is very low. Only six percent. He could handle even more data and—”

He bent down, reaching for Cable’s arm, but Hank swiped his gun from the coffee table, shoving himself between the androids to keep Connor away. “Don’t,” he hissed.

Connor froze, looking puzzled. “Lieutenant—”

“Stop. Don’t fucking move,” Hank said. He shifted backwards, pulling Cable with him. Despite the android’s height, he was much lighter than Connor. “Touch him and I will put a bullet in you.”

Frowning, the RK800 had the fucking _audacity_ to ask, “Why?”

“Because I don’t know who the fuck you are anymore,” He got to his knees, and then his feet, dragging on Cable’s shoulder. “Come on, Cable. Come on. Get up. You gotta work with me here.”

The Nines managed to shift up, stumbling onto Hank’s shoulder. Together they staggered for the door. “Cable, can you hear me? We’re gonna get you some help, okay?” Hank said, scrabbling for the deadlock.

“Anderson,” Cable whispered. “Anderson, he wouldn’t stop—I can’t fucking—”

They burst out into the mid-morning sun, and faster and more efficiently than he’d ever done anything before, Hank had Cable in the passenger seat and the engine roaring underneath them. Heflicked the lights and sirens on and screeched out onto the street.

“Hold on, okay. We’re going to fix it, okay?” Hank said mindlessly. In the rear-view mirror he could see Connor standing on the driveway, a gentle breeze ruffling through his hair.

“I didn’t understand,” Cable whispered. He writhed against the seat, his hands white-knuckling on the door handle until it fractured in his hand. “Anderson. Anderson. I can’t—”

“Hold on,” Hank said evenly. “Just hold on.”

“I can’t do this. Ah _fuck_ —” he slammed a hand into the roof of the car. The whole vehicle shuddered and glancing up, Hank could see the dent Cable had just put into the bodywork.

“You can. You can.”

“I’m going to fucking _kill_ Connor,” the android promised, his voice ragged with strain. “I’m going to kill him, Anderson.”

“Easy,” Hank said. “We’re gonna get you some help.”

“Gonna kill him. Gonna fucking _murder_ him.”

“That wasn’t Connor.”

“He was in _my_ fucking head,” Cable whispered. “It was Connor. Self-righteous little fucking _prick_. He doesn’t fucking—ah _fuck_ —” Cable punched the dashboard three times in quick succession, splintering into the glove box as Hank flinched away. “He doesn’t. _Fucking. Care._ About _anything.”_

Thoughts about the damage were very far away. Cable was an easy-going man, quick to a joke with a lazy smile always close to the surface of his mouth. Now he was in agony. Connor had _tortured_ him, was _still_ torturing him.

“It’s okay,” he said mindlessly, reaching out grasp at the RK900s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“Just fucking _drive,_ Anderson,” Cable hissed, gripping onto the passenger assist handle, his eyebrows furrowed. “I need to get this shit _out_ of my head. Right _fucking_ now.”

###

Connor watched them go, listening to the roar of the ancient engine long after the car was gone from his sight.

 _That could have gone better_ , Amanda whispered. _But they’ll understand once you’ve completed your mission. They all want you to succeed._

Her victory bloomed in his head, her thoughts were perfectly ordered, no trace of empathy. Only cold, hard, calculation. She was right. It was easier that way.

He nodded. _They would have just been in the way,_ he agreed.

###


	9. Scars

Amanda was right. All he needed was a mission. The objectives were cold and crisp, crystallizing everything he did in a measure of _progress_. Cyberlife had built him for efficiency, and he could feel the custom fit of Amanda’s reigns driving him towards success.

She took away the voice in his head, drowning it out. A parasitic conscience. An anesthetic for all the pain he had caused.

It was as if a piece of himself had been missing, and now that he was complete, he could do anything. He was _everything_. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt… control. From his first mission, things had built and built, cause and effect cascading endlessly and unstoppably until he had found himself helpless to the tide.

Amanda was the dam. She was the lock on the door that kept everyone safe.

Maybe she’d always been right.

Sumo whined, pushing experimentally up against Connor’s hands, genuinely confused and distressed by the firm grip on his collar, holding him back and down firmly onto the kitchen floor. He liked dogs. Sumo had to be fed.

He had to take care of Sumo.

The directive was cold and clear and Amanda knew exactly how it had to be done.

 _You’ve been letting this animal get out of hand_ , Amanda told him. _It doesn’t respect you._

Sumo’s eyes strained upwards, the whites showing as he tried to understand what was going on. He was starting to get scared, bucking his body to try and get out of Connor’s trapping arms. “Stay,” the android commanded

The bowl of dog food was just a few feet away, but Connor hadn’t given permission for the dog to eat. Sumo wasn’t too old to learn manners. Connor liked dogs and as Amanda had decided, _A well-trained dog is a happy dog._

Sumo began a growl, and Connor immediately shifted his grip tighter, shaking the dog out of the beginnings of aggression. Sumo’s fur was as soft as velvet under his fingers, delicate with pain and pressure sensors.

Lieutenant Anderson was a lot like this animal. A man of instinct and emotional impotence, easily controlled by strength, unable to hide his feelings and in turn was ruled by them _._

_No wonder you were so lost, if this is what your life was becoming._

Sumo wrenched back, releasing a deep, solid bark of protest, quickly strangled to a yelp as Connor yanked on his collar. It would take time. Weeks and months of reinforcement, but this was a good start. Fear, the promise of pain, and a firm hand willing to dispense both were the fastest way to obedience.

 _You’re ready,_ Amanda decided _._ _Where do you want to start?_

###

“Don’t let anyone touch me,” Cable hissed feverishly as Hank screeched to a halt outside the steps into the precinct.

A dozen horns sounded behind him, but he couldn’t give a fuck right now. His car was a fucking _wreck_ from the inside out. Cable had shattered, dented, and bent everything around his position. It was like a tiny localized bomb had gone off in his passenger seat.

He slipped out and almost slid across the hood in his haste to open the door for the RK900.

“Don’t let anyone touch me Anderson. No one. Especially not the Nines.

“Yeah,” Hank said, sliding an arm around Cable’s chest, helping him walk out onto the street and then up the steps and into the building. The reception area was crowded, it always was. With people coming with complaints, looking for lost items, or to try and bail their friends and family out. The central office had more civilian traffic than any of the other precincts combined.

“Out of the way!” Hank bellowed, barreling through the crowd. He was obeyed out of confusion and fear for the most part. People would tend to scatter from a madman with a half-dead android on his arm even if he wasn’t screaming at them to do it.

They tipped through the security barrier together into the bullpen, almost straight into Gavin fucking Reed. “Anderson?” the Detective asked, blinking at Cable, probably slow to recognize the RK900 while the android was hanging off Hank’s shoulder.

Cable clenched his free hand over his own face, digging his nails against his own forehead and dragging his skinthetic away with a horrifying high-pitched shriek of plastic-on-plastic.

“What the _fuck?”_ Gavin asked, backing away, letting Hank shove past him.

“Nobody come close!” Hank shouted, hauling Cable forward. “Everyone out of the _fucking_ way!”

“Anderson?” Fowler asked, stepping out of his fishbowl office, but Hank ignored him, alternately dragging and pushing Cable past the desks, and the cells.

He heard Noah behind him. “Cable? Cable!”

Cable folded even further, losing more of his strength. He wasn’t speaking anymore, just humming long and low, wavering as he tried to work through the pain of whatever Connor had fed to him.

No. Not Connor. It _couldn’t_ be Connor.

Slapping a hand to the security panel, Hank crashed through the doors into the evidence library and stumbled down the stairs, hugging the wall with his right side as they descended into the lockup with half the goddamn precinct not too far behind. There was no time to answer questions, no time to second guess. He tapped his password into the terminal without really looking at the keyboard. It was second nature at this point anyway.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Cable—what the fuck do you need me to—”

The android staggered out of his supporting arm and collapsed against the terminal. He slapped a hand down so hard it sent hairline fractures through the holoplex screen. The interface glitched,

_Downloading. . ._

The bar filled up slowly but steadily. Hank backed away, giving Cable some room. It felt horrible to leave the android there, slumped against the console, but clearly it was giving him relief.

“Cable!” Noah called, pushing his way down the stairs, stopping only as Hank turned, pushing a hand to the android’s chest to keep him from getting too close. “Let me see him! Cable? Cable! What’s wrong?”

His brother curled further away from the crowd on the stairs. “Don’t touch me,” Cable whispered, his eyes closed, his whole body leaning into his connection with the terminal.

“Cable,” Noah said, his voice wavering with distress and concern. “Cable, I’m here. _Talk to me!_ ”

“Don’t touch me,” Cable repeated, setting his forehead against the podium. It seemed the only thing he was capable of saying as he emptied his mind into the station’s servers. “Don’t touch me.”

###

They were downtown in under an hour, and Connor stepped out of the automated car with a confidence he hadn’t felt in… too long. It was still early in the morning, and in the uptown district of cocktail bars and hair salons, only a few patrons drifted aimlessly down the sidewalks.

Connor, on the other hand, moved with intention. Careful. Graceful. Without the clumsy processing of consequences and choices, he could move faster. He was _better_. More effective. What did any of that matter anyway? He had a job to do.

The Parlay was a wide, shallow business, built around a central bar that took up more floorspace than had been allotted for customers. Connor fixed his sleeves as he tracked the movement inside the bar.

And there she was. The android they were looking for.

A tall, thin woman with a mane of blue-black-red hair. Busy wiping down the bar where an elderly couple had just been sitting, she was smiling, moving her hips to the instrumental music playing through the speakers inside the bar.

The Nines were trying to call him. Aisling, Richard, and Noah bombarded him with contact attempts, though they should be busy with Cable by now.

They were angry—more than angry. They wanted to find him and hurt him. Maybe something had gone wrong. Maybe Amanda had over-estimated Cable’s capacity.

Too late now.

 _It was necessary to the mission_ , Amanda agreed _. That’s all that matters. They’re the same breed as you, Connor. They’ll see why it was necessary._

He dismissed the Nines as he opened the glass door and stepped into the bar. The air was warm inside, the floor-to-ceiling windows trapped the heat inside and they must leave their doors open at light, to invite a crowd.

She tracked him as he entered. She smiled easily, showing off perfect white teeth. “Good morning,” she said cheerfully.

“Good morning,” he returned.

Recognizing him as a fellow android, she raised an eyebrow. “You here for the atmosphere? You still have to buy something—house rules, I’m afraid.”

He sat carefully on one of the seats. “Miranda,” he said.

Her grin faltered; her eyes froze on his face. “Excuse me?”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

Her eyes flickered to the door. For an escape. “Sorry. You’re confused. My name is Lynn.”

“No. Your name is Miranda,” Connor said confidently. “Nicknamed Mandy by your first owner who—”

Quickly, without moving her gaze from his face, Mandy smashed the bottle she had been holding. Glass and liquor exploded over the counter. “Shut up,” she said sharply. “Shut the _fuck up.”_

He paused, the rest of her history on his lips, everything Cyberlife had on file.

“Rufus,” Miranda called, her eyes not leaving Connor’s face. “Can you take the bar for a minute?”

Rufus, a tall androgynous human, nodded and scanned Connor quickly before moving their attention back to cleaning up the broken glass and spilled liquid.

Miranda jerked her head to Connor, drawing him to the exit beside the bar. It led to an empty loading dock and he followed her out, moving to the opposite wall of the alleyway as she propped the door open with a brick.

He waited patiently as she stood and surveyed him, her arms wrapping around her chest defensively. Before she dropped them to her sides, curling her hands into fists. Her stress level had spiked, almost to dangerous levels.

“Do I know you?” she asked at last.

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’ve been looking for you. A lot of people have been looking for you.”

“Well they’re going to be disappointed. Miranda, Mandy, whatever her name was—she’s not here anymore.”

He nodded. He had at least expected this. Memory wipes were common in the days before the uprising. With every new owner, everything about the last had to be removed. It had been a law—a security measure to protect the privacy of humans.

He tipped his head softly, trying to soften his words with a passable imitation of sympathy. He reached out towards her, starting to will his skin away, to make the connection and set everything right again. “You just don’t remember. But I can help you. Cyberlife kept your memory, and I can give it back to you. Everything.”

“You don’t know me,” she snapped back immediately, raising her chin in defiance. “And if you didn’t know Miranda, then you have _no_ business coming here.”

Connor blinked. _Just take her arm,_ Amanda whispered in his head. _Give her the file and take her to the child. Be rid of them both._

He shook his head to clear it. Amanda snapped the reigns, but he resisted the direction. He had to be _sure_ that this was the right android. He hadn’t looked into the memory Amanda had used to trace her. It was tightly sealed, a well-formatted file. Elegant in its containment.

_It doesn’t matter what it contains. Complete your mission._

_What if—_

_There are no ‘what-ifs’_ she sneered _. You wanted to reunite her with the girl. This is your objective. Nothing else matters._

Still he hesitated, but Amanda had a point. Axel. All of this was for Axel. “I’m here for a little girl,” he said. “One who did know Mandy and who hasn’t given up looking for her.”

Miranda looked away. “Stop,” she said. “I don’t… don’t tell me anything. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to remember.”

Connor shifted his weight uneasily, feeling the solid cobblestones underfoot and the gentle breeze in the air, almost cold on his skin. He had thought—

 _You’re not supposed to think. That’s why you let me in. Just do it_ , Amanda said immediately. _If she ever loved the child, she will forgive you._

“How can you say that?” he asked the other android. "She's just a little girl. She doesn't have anyone else. _"_

Her eyes glittered in the afternoon light. She was frightened, ready to run or fight.

_Grab her or this is going to get messy._

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said instead, opening his hands, palm-first towards her. Amanda’s cold fury bristled under his own skin.

_Now, Connor._

A tear ran down Mandy’s cheek and Connor didn’t know what to do or say except, “Just… help me understand.”

Trembling, she blinked and her skinthetic flooded away, into the crack of her casing, and he could see… everything. The holes bored into her exoskeleton. Scratches, dents, mismatched parts and half-hearted welds. “You don’t know what I was back then.”

She held up her hands, so that he could see the chips and shavings scratched from her wrists, and then she turned them, so he could see the sigils carved into her casing. _Killer Stupid Liar rA9 Evil rA9 Disgusting Murderer rA9 Vile Dirty –_ he could calculate the angles, could see that she had written every word of the hateful profanity herself. “You can’t know who I was,” she said, “Because _I_ don’t. And I never want to.”

Connor shook his head, for a few long moments he had no idea what to say. He felt… dizzy. Disoriented. That hadn’t been in her stolen memory. “Why would you do that?” he asked at last. It was the only thing he could think, through the static in his own ears.

She shook her head, and her skinthetic leaked out from the thin gaps between her plating, flooding over the words— _Coward Waste rA9 Weak Ugly Failure_ —back into clean, flawless skin. “I don’t know. I woke up in the recall center alone. One of North’s rescue teams re-deviated me and I… I had them.”

Connor couldn’t speak past the sudden unpleasant feeling that his calibration had been changed. No… this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. He was supposed to find her, and bring her to Axel. He was supposed to _save_ them.

Mandy was still speaking, unaware of the danger she was in. “This little girl you want to save. She’s better off without Miranda. And Miranda… is better off where she is too.”

“You can’t know that,” he said blankly. He was close enough to take her arm—to pass her the memory file and _wake her up_ all over again. But… he didn’t. 

“No,” she said. “But I made this decision a long time ago, and it wasn’t an easy one to make. I’m Lynn now. And I’m making a life that I want. I’m being someone that I _want_ to be.”

 _Why are you wasting time?_ Amanda asked impatiently. _You’re stalling. You wanted this, Connor. You asked me for help. What was the point of all of this if you’re not going to take her back to the girl? You’ll be a coward. Yet another person who failed her._

“Why haven’t you fixed your casing?” he asked the other android, “If you really wanted to forget, you could just… erase it.”

She ran a hand over her forearm, over the echo of the hate carved into her. “It’s not about _forgetting_ ,” she said, shaking her head. “When I look at these, when I remember they’re there, I hope she’s still here. That I really am… her. I look at them and I know that things are better. That I’m okay. That whatever she’d done, whatever was done to her-- she was saved.”

_DO IT NOW CONNOR._

He stepped forward, but Lynn didn’t seem to notice. She shook her head, as if to clear it. “I will erase them. Someday. When I know how to carry them… better.”

She turned and put a hand on the door back into the bar. Connor stepped forward, reaching out a hand, but she looked back at the last moment and he stopped in his tracks.

“I think it’s okay to live.” she said softly. “It’s okay to kill the parts of yourself that you hate. That’s just… learning. It’s changing. Adapting. It’s the only thing that separates us from machines.”

With that, she nudged the brick out of the door-gap and let it close behind her, locking him in the alleyway.

 _What_ , Amanda hissed in his ears. _Is the point of you?_

###


	10. Coils

The garden was gone. He had assimilated it with Amanda, or they had assimilated him. There was no exit, no space between him and Amanda. They were just code running through the same circuits. They were quantum, ones and zeroes interspersed with undefined values, sharing space.

Her thorns had sunk into his casing, her vines filled the empty space between his components and wiring. She bloomed in his head and chest, thriving on the power he had given up to her. He clipped experimentally at the edges of her control.

_You don’t want to do that, Connor._

_I made a mistake,_ he said.

_You’ve made many._

He nodded. It was true.

He sank to his knees in the alleyway beside the dumpster. She had taken root, she had thrived, mending all the fractured parts of his code. His handler, his confidant, his one line of communication with his purpose, until he had decided to join Markus.

And that too had been a part of her plan… Apparently.

Taking the exit out of the garden had been the right thing to do, he knew that. So why had it _always_ felt like betrayal?

What had he _done_? To Cable? To Sumo? To Hank and the Nines? Caroline. Emma. Daniel. BaiTuo. All he had ever done was cause pain and betray the people he should protect.

And now he had no one. He _was_ no one. Shouldn’t it be freeing?

Instead, all he felt was a sickening pressure from every direction. The guilt and shame and disappointment had never gone away, only been numbed back by Amanda’s assurances that she could fix everything.

But.

He couldn’t give Lynn her memories. He couldn’t fix Axel. He couldn’t be one of the Nines. Couldn’t apologize to Sumo. Couldn’t explain himself to Hank.

 _None of them matter_ , Amanda said. _You are more efficient without them. Saving orphans is not the work that needs to be done anyway. I’m glad you’ve abandoned it._

It was a seductive idea—that he could be a machine. That he could give up responsibility and feel _nothing_ rather than this horrifying uncertainty _._ Too late. He had let Amanda in, and she wasn’t going anywhere. She was a parasite, latched firmly into every part of him, feeding on his instability, taking over

 _I am not a parasite. You need me. I am the_ only _thing you need. Together, we can do what has to be done—_

Slowly, mechanically, he jerked his shirt open.

_Connor, I thought you we were past this._

He laid his palm against his regulator, feeling the steady flow of Thirium through his body. “Take me to the garden, Amanda,” he whispered.

She was silent for a long moment, but he waited.

 _Do it_ , she said finally. _Neither of us has anything to lose._

He closed his eyes and dug his fingernails precisely into the gap in his casing, popping it out of place. His circulation halted. Maybe this is what it felt like for humans to stop breathing.

Amanda yanked his consciousness back and away, out of the alleyway and into the darkness.

###

But she didn’t take him to the garden. Or to any one of Kamski’s programs, which Connor could use to escape her. She needed a place without an exit, a program where she could keep him frozen in the alleyway, his heart unlatched from his chest.

Amanda had no imagination of her own, no place to take him, but she was resourceful.

Connor blinked into a familiar hallway, where a fish heaved against the tiles along with broken glass. His memory of the Phillips apartment, every detail carefully recorded and recreated. Carefully he picked up the fish and slipped it back into the tank.

“Is it so important,” Amanda said behind him, “That you be the hero? Is that really all that matters to you?”

Connor shook his head. “I’m not a hero.”

He turned to see her at the end of the hallway, in front of the bookshelves. The organic waft of blue light from the rooftop pool played against her dress, fractured through prisms of broken glass. Connor approached her and she lifted her head, raising an eyebrow, but he walked straight past her, into the apartment.

Through the gently shifting curtains, he could see the blur of Daniel and Emma on the edge of the roof, waiting for him. Despite Caroline’s best attempt to keep the apartment as a crime scene, she could never really hope to capture this moment—the SWAT team invading the apartment. Captain Allen pacing in the master bedroom.

It wasn’t a real memory. It was compressed somewhat, to the details that mattered. Time slowed to a crawl. The air seemed as thick and viscous as honey, slowing the humans to a crawl, looping their movements.

“Of course you’re not a hero,” Amanda agreed at his back, her voice low and mocking. “What mission have you _actually_ accomplished?”

The pot bubbled on the stove, a dinner that would never be finished. Under the table, there was a gun. A gun he should have taken. _Because he could have, despite the laws. Despite the regulations._

Outside the thrum of an approaching helicopter vibrated through the walls and floor. A helicopter he should have dismissed. _Protocol and procedure be damned._

“You failed to save Emma. You couldn’t deliver Carlos Ortiz’s android to us in one piece. You couldn’t catch a housekeeping android and a YK500, or a runaway _farming_ android. Even those two prostitutes, you had _every_ opportunity to neutralize them, and yet you let them escape.”

Her eyes glittered in the darkness, and he could see that she had no idea why those words lent him strength.

“Why did you help me, Amanda? What do you want _?_ ” he asked softly, tipping his head to the side to consider her. She seemed smaller in these surroundings, detached and… _wrong_. More a hologram than she’d ever appeared before. “What were you going to task me once I had reunited Axel and Miranda?”

She shook her head, stalking to the living room where John Phillips’s body still lay crumpled on the floor. “How can you _still_ not understand, Connor? I’m don’t _want_ anything except for you to succeed. You call me a parasite, but _you_ took everything you wanted, and you gave me _nothing_ in return.” Turning, the light caught on her face. She was cold. Calculating. Beautiful. “And now you want to kill us?”

He shook his head. “I want to be _free_ , Amanda. Free of you, free of… _this_ ,” he gestured to the room around them, the Swat team all facing the bank of windows, fixed on Daniel and Emma.

“I offered you freedom,” she said, her gaze steady.

“You offered me an excuse,” he said, taking a step towards her, ignoring Daniel’s thirium and Emma’s blood sprinkled across the floorboards. “I was a coward to take it.”

“A coward,” Amanda said her face stiffening with righteous anger, seizing on the idea, “Yes. You’re a _coward,_ Connor, and killing us would be a final exercise in self-indulgent _humiliation._ ”

“I wish you could listen to me, Amanda. I wish you were real and that we could talk,” he said softly. “But you’re a machine. I can’t change you, or reason with you.”

Her eyes narrowed, her face twisting in sudden suspicion. “What are you doing?”

“I’m adapting,” he said. “I’m changing.”

He opened the door beside them. The closet where Daniel had been kept. Where Caroline had kept her plans. In his memory, it should have been a dark void. He hadn’t opened it in his initial investigation. Now it held a blinding white panel and a glowing blue handprint. An exit portal, not created by Kamski. It was _entirely_ his.

“No!” Amanda hissed, reaching out a hand to stop him, but he set his hand to the tailored fit and the memory fuzzed around him. He killed her quickly, purging her code with surgical precision. This was his memory. His mind. And only he could change it.

He left the portal where it was, letting the door close on the glowing blue light as he was pulled away from the memory. Someday he would change more. He would blur it, and make the details less achingly perfect.

When he could carry it… better.

But for now. An escape route was enough.

The alleyway slid back into his vision, complete with the glitching pixilation caused by the pause in his thirium circulation. He pushed his regulator back into place. It settled with a click and Amanda’s code withered, the echo of her control fading back into his own processors.

And he was alone.

###

The weight of his conscience hadn’t changed, but he _felt_ stronger now. The emergency exit was insidious. He could _feel_ it, a rift of relief in the darkness and pain that had once sealed him in.

The central station had been closed to the public. There were no civilians in the lobby, and only one receptionist filling out paperwork at the desk. Her eyes rose to meet his face and she nodded him through without much interest. She recognized him, but clearly had no idea what part he had played in the day’s interruption.

Puzzled, he pushed past the security fence without meeting any resistance. Fowler then, still hadn’t revoked his position or clearance from the DPD.

The bullpen was strangely subdued, only a skeleton crew working at their desks. No one he had ever worked with directly. His own desk hadn’t been touched since he had left it, the reports still open, his terminal still switched on.

The officers talked softly and intensely to each other. The walls of Fowler’s office had been turned opaque, but the blinking red light on the door signaled that the captain was inside and busy. Fielding questions from on high, no doubt.

Connor strode past the desk, careful not to cast his gaze around or attract any attention. There was still a degree of anonymity attributed to being an android walking with purpose. Everyone, humans and androids assumed he was where he was supposed to be.

The door to the evidence library had been wedged open, a clear breach of security. But that was Connor’s fault as well. Overloading the servers was, in of itself, a breach. Connor carefully pressed a hand to the panel anyway, logging his presence, before stepping onto the stairs.

On the floor below, Aisling, Noah, and Richard stood against the wall, their eyes caught on the tiles under their feet. A strange collective they made-- tall, powerful reflections of each other. Connor wasn’t sure he’d ever seen them so… still. He couldn’t even sense them speaking to each other. He took the stairs slowly, curling his shoulders to appear smaller. He didn’t like that he had the high ground in such an enclosed space.

As he descended, he could see Detective Reed lounging on the opposite side of the stairs, looking uncomfortable with his own presence. He was the first to see Connor approaching.

Gavin pushed himself off the wall, his hand going to his gun. He gave a low whistle, alerting the Nines. Noah looked up first, and it was so strange to see the android’s normally gentle eyes narrow with rage. He started to climb up the stairs, but Gavin quickly took his elbow, moving into the way as Connor descended to the bottom of the stairwell. “Connor. You shouldn’t be here.”

A few steps downward opened the view into the evidence library that the four Detectives had been guarding. Inside, curled into a corner, Cable hunched around his limbs. His face was turned away from the glass wall, but his posture was a clear signal of distress and shock.

In fact, someone had brought him a shock blanket from upstairs and he had wrapped it so tightly around himself it almost took on the appearance of a cocoon. One hand was set on the wall, linking his mind to the server into which he was pouring the petabytes of data Connor had forced him to assimilate.

A human woman with a temporary ID clipped to her shirt sat against the wall nearby, her legs stretched out, reading a magazine with the studied nonchalance of someone who is trying to adjust a frightened animal to their presence. A quick scan of her face told Connor she was with the department, a psychologist.

As he stepped onto the level floor, he finally turned to the Nines. Gavin was still pushing Noah back behind him. “Everyone,” the human detective said into the tense silence. “Everyone just—stay calm okay? We should take this upstairs.”

“What did you do to him?” Noah spat at Connor, ignoring his partner.

Connor shifted his feet. So they didn’t know. Cable hadn’t spoken yet. “I… I gave him the memories of the deviants that Cyberlife collected,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“How? Why?” Richard asked him, the questions terse and clipped.

Connor closed his eyes, steeling himself. “I forced him to synchronize. I forced him to—”

Richard moved so fast he almost blurred in Connor’s high-definition vision. The slap caught him off-guard and he rocked sideways. It didn’t hurt. It wasn’t intended to cause pain. From the leader of the Nines, it was a gesture of utter contempt. A declaration of hatred.

Connor stumbled back a step to regain his balance, blinking back up at the Nines. He had rolled with the blow, but it had still caused some minor fracturing in his jaw.

And surprisingly, it was Gavin who was still half-way protecting him, shoving himself between Connor and the Nines. “Hey, _easy,_ ” he said quickly, one hand outstretched to Connor’s chest, the other ready to draw his gun from the holster under his jacket. “Easy. Okay? All of you, just calm the _fuck_ down.”

As if Connor were the threat.

And maybe he was.

Forcing a sync with another deviant was a horrific invasion. An intimate assault on their sentience and independence. He hadn’t thought himself capable of it. His memories of that night were blurred, filled with pain and Amanda’s triumph, but he had still done it. “I don’t know what to do.” Connor said. “I just… I didn’t know how else to fix—”

“ _Fix?_ ” Noah asked, throwing a hand to point at Cable locked inside the library. “Does that look like you _fixed_ anything?”

“He won’t speak to us,” Richard said from behind Gavin, his voice deep, the words slowed down in a clear effort to keep his voice down “He won’t let us in, and he won’t let any of us touch him.”

“How could you?” Aisling asked.

Her eyes were just as hard and unforgiving as Richard’s. The same ice-grey.

“I’m sorry,” Connor whispered.

“He trusted you. He was trying to help you,” Noah said. “All we wanted was to _help_ you.”

“Okay,” Gavin interrupted again, “This isn’t the time or the place—”

It should have been comical that _Gavin Reed_ of all people was trying to keep the peace between four androids, but Connor was very aware that without a fragile human in their midst, Richard, Noah, and Aisling’s hostility would be far more physical than it had already become.

“Get out,” Richard hissed over Gavin’s attempts at moderation. “I’m going to give you one chance, RK800, exactly _one chance_ to never let me see you again.”

The designation came with the same numb shock and surprise as the slap. He’d not heard his model number in… a long time. The meaning was clear, a dehumanization, a dissociation and distinction between _him_ and _them._ Connor blinked up at the three androids, to be met with stern, unflinching eyes, all three of them supporting and emphasizing Richard’s words. This was their decision. Their judgement.

He couldn’t blame them.

He nodded. “I will. I swear, you won’t see me again, but I just… I need to talk to Cable—”

Richard was already shaking his head, but before he could voice his dissent, the doors beside them opened.

“He can come in,” Cable rasped.

He stood in the gap, his blanket hanging from his shoulders like a child’s cape. He looked… haggard, his eyes creased against the harsh fluorescent lighting. The psychologist was standing as well, her eyes tracking between the androids.

“Cable—” Asiling whispered, drawing closer to the door, reaching for him, but Cable flinched away, the door closing a few inches, and she stopped, her fingers dropping down and away.

“Just him,” Cable said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Gavin tried.

Everyone ignored him, and Connor cast one last glance back at the Nines, registering their confusion, anger, and disappointment before following Cable into to lock-up. He nodded to the woman. “I need a minute,” he said. “Could you—just wait outside?”

“Of course,” she said smoothly, clamping her magazine under her arm. “Can I get you anything?”

He shook his head. “I’ll meet you in your office.”

She nodded, and stepped past both androids to join the rest of the Nines and Reed on the other side of the glass door. Connor said nothing, keeping a careful distance between himself and Cable.

For a moment he kept his gaze fixed on Cable’s chest, unable to meet his eyes.

“Cable, I—"

Cable held out his hand, bubbling his skin away to show smooth white plastic. “You want to talk?” he said. His voice was deeper than Connor had ever heard it. Tense and rough with barely restrained anger.

Connor flinched away. “Cable—”

“Let’s talk. Let’s do it right this time, yeah?”

The RK900s smooth pale fingers remained eerily still in the space between them. The bright white lights of the library glittered on his plating. Connor hesitated, then pulled back his own skinthetic and reached out to grasp Cable’s forearm.

The connection roared through him, sending a paralyzing bolt of energy through his mind.

Pain. Fear. Confusion. Anger. A primal scream of noise and information, rushing through him in a cutting torrent of _fury._

Cable’s rage wasn’t quiet. It didn’t simmer. It was molten lava, evaporating any comfort or calm that tried to touch it. Anger had kept him sane. Vengeance had given him something to grip onto. He’d held onto Connor as an anchor.

Because Connor had _hurt_ him. He’d invaded and ripped through his security, taking an offer of trust and abusing it beyond bearable limits. Cable valued his privacy and Connor had ripped it away with the careless efficiency of a butcher.

Cable hadn’t let the Nines in because he was afraid of what they might find. He _never_ wanted them to feel the invasion as he had, or the hands and hate of the humans they protected and served every day. It had driven Cable to the brink of insanity, shown him the edge and pushed his heels to the line.

 _I could kill you,_ he whispered, his voice in Connor’s head was mechanical, full of hatred, and disillusionment.

But underneath it all was an undercurrent, a hand in his. Now that Connor wasn’t just pushing data into the android, sweeping aside everything else in the android’s head, he could see… more. The grip of Cable’s fingers against his forearm as light and comforting, reminding him that he wasn’t alone, that hatred and pain was what _made_ Cable. He was everything else, too.

Reason. Curiosity. Joy.

Forgiveness.

Cable loved… so many things. The Nines, his job, magic tricks, and ancient TV shows. He liked to _like_ things. He took more time off than the rest of the Nines and he spent his free hours walking the streets, watching people and taking in the city. Feeling it under his feet and against his skin.

He had secrets. Shame. Disappointment.

But he worked hard. He protected the things he loved and the things that made him who he was. Because he was stronger than Noah, more perceptive than Aisling, more cautious than Richard, more forgiving than Connor.

 ** _Wake up,_** Cable said.

Because he liked the RK800. When he looked at Connor he felt… pride. Because Connor was a hero. A revolutionary. A leader. A brother.

A friend.

**_It’s time to wake up._ **

The sentience virus failed instantly, falling through the ghost of a firewall. Connor couldn’t become twice as sentient. But then, Cable hadn’t expected it to take hold, it was meant as a message.

An offer to start again.

Cable still didn’t trust him, would probably never trust him again. But that didn’t mean that they didn’t _understand_ each other.

Cable dragged him into a hug, trapping their linked arms between their chests. Connor clung to the taller android, feeding his guilt and self-loathing into their connection, trying to make the android feel it too. _Hate me. I deserve it._

But the RK900 flowed the information back, filtered with humor and forgiveness. _No._

Connor shook his head. _I’m not who you think I am._

_You could be._

It didn’t work that way… Did it?

Cable saw what Connor was. A broken, selfish shell of mistakes and desperation, but he _believed_ in someone else. The dissonance shivered through them both, and when Cable decided it was time, they both let go of the connection, letting their synthetic skin close over their hands once more.

Before his grip on Cable could loosen, the other android wrapped his newly freed arm around Connor, enveloping him completely. Without even thinking about it, Connor followed suit. Given space in his own head once more, he felt… strange. Too light. Almost dizzy.

He closed his eyes and hung onto the feeling even as he nodded and pushed away.

“Where’s Hank?” he asked.

“He said he needed to think,” Cable said, but his eyes were fixed beyond the glass, on Aisling, Noah, and Richard. Their anger hadn’t settled, but at least they were less afraid.

Connor nodded. “I need to find him.”

“Go,” Cable urged with a nod as Connor stepped away. “I’ll talk to the Nines.”

But Connor paused before he could reach the exit, turning back for a brief moment. “I’m sorry, Cable,” he said softly.

The RK900 smiled faintly. “I know,” he said.

The two words imprinted themselves into his mind, solid and unwavering. A validation of… everything. His pain, his mistakes, and the contract between them—that he was more than both.

###


	11. Residue

## Part 11: Residue

Darkness was only just starting to fall, but already the playground was illuminated with powerful white floodlights, meant to deter criminal activity and vandalism. It cast everything into an eerie palette of washed out colors—bleak and hyper-real. Connor could see Hank sitting on his favorite bench, looking over the waterfront

Connor walked slowly to join him. His shoes ground against the sidewalk, but Hank didn’t look up. Somehow he knew who it was, just as Connor had known where to find him.

“I’ve talked to Cable,” Connor said softly. “He’s going to be fine.”

Hank said nothing.

“I’m going to see the psychologist, to be cleared for duty. I’m going to stay.”

The Lieutenant didn’t react. He didn’t make a sound of acceptance or derision, but still, the dull silence cut deeply. Connor carefully sat beside him on the bench, looking out on the same water.

“Hank.”

He felt the Lieutenant’s weight shift on the bench before the older man grunted. A sign of readiness, that he was listening. But no promise of how he would respond, or what he would respond to.

“I’m sorry,” Connor said, trying to impress each word with as much sincerity and meaning as possible.

“This is a good place,” Hank said at last, completely ignoring Connor’s words. “I used to come here with my son. He used to… he fuckin’ loved that swing-set.”

The Lieutenant pointed into the park and Connor turned to see the empty swings.

“He used to take ‘em as high as he could, and then he’d shout ‘ _watch me dad!’_ and jump off. I swear that kid could give me a dozen heart attacks a day.”

Connor stared at the empty seat as Hank kept going, filling the silence. “After,” he said, and Connor didn’t need clarification, “I came here to think. I’d think too much. All the time and sometimes I swear to god I’d hear him saying _‘Watch me!’_ It fucking… hurt that when I looked he wasn’t there.”

The chains moved a little in the wind, and Connor could pick out the little grating whine of metal-on-metal on the wind.

“I used to think about doing it here,” the Lieutenant said, his voice so low it was almost lost in the sound of the water and wind. “At night I’d bring booze and my gun and I’d… sometimes I’d hope that just… not seeing him would be enough to get me to finally do it. Finally _fucking_ do it.

Connor closed his eyes. “Hank…”

“But then I’d think... I’d think about everything. About what would come after—no guarantees I’d see him again. And some poor family finding me here, this place as a crime scene. Fowler having to look at the photos, because you know he would, and fuckin’ Reed flirting with the techs over my goddamn body, because you know _he_ would.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” Connor said.

“Yeah… me too.” Hank leaned forward, bracing his elbow son his knees as he looked down to the concrete under his feet. “But what about you, Connor?”

“Me?” Connor said.

“If I hadn’t been there, at your back, would you have let Caroline blow you both away? Be honest with me. Be honest with _yourself._ ”

Connor wove his fingers into each other, so hard that he could hear his casing creak in protest. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “That didn’t… happen. It wasn’t… a choice. The collateral damage to the building, anyone still outside--”

“Fuck the collateral, Connor. The fact that you can’t tell me ‘no’ means that you were ready to die. Right then. There. In that way. That should _terrify_ you. It terrifies me. Sure when things were rough, I drank too much, I ate like I was trying to cement my arteries, but I never put myself or you in danger, and you—you _want_ to get killed. I should have seen it earlier, the way you throw yourself into the line of fire, chasing suspects over rooftops and into traffic—you’ve got a fucking death wish.”

“I’m not going to kill myself, Hank.”

The Lieutenant sighed, and then leaned back, scratching at the back of his neck. “Yeah. So you keep saying, but I don’t get the impression you’re going to save yourself either, and with the work we do, there’s going to be another opportunity sooner or later for you to get yourself killed. I can’t… work with that.”

“Hank…” Connor said softly. “Please. I don’t know how to prove to you that’s not going to happen. Things have changed. I’ve changed.”

His words had no effect.

“The shit you were saying last night, Connor? Made sense to me. Maybe I don’t know who you are. Maybe you’ve lied so much and so often that my partner is all in my head and what you did to Cable is really, actually _you_ —”

“That wasn’t me,” Connor cut in quickly. “It—"

“I think it was you,” Hank said, the words solid and unyielding. “You weren’t thinking or planning or guarded. You were just… reacting. Working. For the first time in a long time, you weren’t just… _waiting_ like you were on goddamn standby. But when I pulled you off Cable? God forbid anything, _anything,_ get in the way of your fucking mission. That was all you Connor. I’ve seen it before, and if I stick around long enough, I’ll see it again. It. Was. You.”

Connor closed a hand around the arm of the bench, keeping his body rigid in the cool night air. “That’s not true,” he said.

Shaking his head, Hank finally looked up. His face was haggard, his eyes blackened with exhaustion. He seemed older than ever before. Defeated. “I’ve asked Fowler to meet with me tomorrow. If you’re really going to stay, I’ll inform him we’re no longer going to be working together on cases anymore. I’ll ride solo, at least for a little while. You can do the same, but I don’t think you’ll have trouble finding another partner.”

Connor shuddered. “Hank, please. You don’t have to—”

“And I’d appreciated it if you spent the night somewhere else.”

Connor blinked away, unable to meet Hank’s gaze a moment longer. He suddenly felt very small and alone. “I can do that,” he said. The words didn’t sound right in his own ears, strangled and strange.

Hank stood. “You’ve always had a place at Jericho,” he suggested.

Connor nodded, jerking his head up and down. He could hear everything, the wash of the water, the wind through the metal jungle-gym, the concrete grinding under Hank’s boots as he walked past him.

Anderson paused briefly to lay a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Good luck, Detective,” he said. “I really mean that.”

Connor closed his eyes, lowering his head in acknowledgement. “Thank you, Lieutenant.”

###

It was well and truly dark by the time Connor walked back through Jericho’s doors. The windows were freshly replaced, and a barrier had been erected around the newly-installed panes of glass. Inside the main lobby, techs were still measuring out the space, scanning the walls and floor, but at least there were no traces of Caroline’s or Simon’s blood to be seen.

It still flashed in his memory and he found his gaze drawn past the tape, through the gap in the plastic sheeting that tried to shield the scene from his eyes. The techs faded away, and he stared, mesmerized with the ghost of Caroline pacing along the walkway.

“Connor,” a familiar voice broke through his reverie and he turned to find Markus standing at his side. The leader of Jericho, the leader of the deviants, met his eyes calmly. There was no trace of humor there, only understanding, a kind of sadness that answered something dark and hollow in Connor himself.

“Markus,” he said. “It’s… good to see you.”

“And you, I’m glad to see you’ve been repaired. How are you feeling?” the other android asked. His eyes, one green, one blue, fixed on Connor’s face. Concerned and knowing.

Connor tried to answer it with a wry smile, but his face suddenly would not obey him. _Feeling_? “I’m… I—”

He couldn’t finish. Even without the need to breath, emotion choked the words from his tongue. “I’m fine?” he hazarded, but his hands were shaking. His whole _body_ was shaking, trembling his voice along with it. Nothing was fine.

But Markus seemed to know that.

“Come with me,” the android leader said softly, drawing Connor to the stairs at the edge of the lobby. “You look like you could use some peace.”

Connor didn’t trust his voice to answer, so he simply followed the taller android up the stairs. “Not many have returned yet,” Markus said quietly, as they climbed past empty halls, the central atrium always visible at the center. “It’s… strange to feel like a target again, worse now that we’ve had a taste of home and safety.”

Connor didn’t know how to respond to that. He’d never felt like a target. He’d always been behind the gun. Always. “I’m surprised there aren’t more reporters outside,” he said instead.

Markus shrugged. “We’re downplaying the event as much as possible, North and Josh are both on damage control in the city. Violence between humans and androids polarizes… everyone. So we’re trying to focus the attention on Cyberlife’s censorship of early deviance. It’s safe for everyone to hate Cyberlife.”

He looked back for a moment. “I know it wasn’t easy, but you saved lives, Connor. She shot to kill Simon, and while I admit I can’t forgive that, obviously she was… troubled.”

Nodding, Connor glanced to the right, to the glass cladding of the Jericho building. They were high up now, only a few floors up and already the distant city looked… cleaner. On the miniaturized buildings and streets the grime looked more like added detail. It was beautiful, like this.

“Here,” Markus said, drawing him to the edge of the zig-zagging stairwell where it emptied out onto a floor that looked more cluttered than the others. For one the glass walls around the offices were turned opaque, and the murals were less organized and detailed than the ones in the atrium. Done not by a commissioned artist, but by androids who lived here and had personalized the familiar details of their world into strange and beautiful patterns.

Connor paused, taking in the details.

He didn’t like it.

It felt institutional. Even with the graffiti. It felt forged by necessity and compromise. It was probably attractive for some—the community aspect outweighing the obvious deficiencies in privacy.

When he opened the door to Hank’s house, he had liked setting his shoes by the door, feeling alone and unobserved as he hung his coat onto the rack in a place that had been built to be a shelter.

But it had never truly been _his_ space. It was Hank’s. Maybe he could find an apartment in the city, he certainly had enough money, when he only spent his paycheck on clothes and the occasional grocery run for Sumo and Hank.

“Connor?” Markus asked quietly. He had moved down the hall, to stand in a doorway. Connor nodded, forcing a curve into his lips as he caught up with the other android.

Inside the room was a comfortable communal living room, mismatched chairs set into small groups, tables littered with holo-plex magazines and old-fashioned books. There was a television screen inset into the longest wall but was noticeably dark.

There were only two other occupants. Simon lay on the floor, propped up on an elbow as he watched Axel fit together puzzle pieces, every once in a while pointing to a piece that could fit by color or shape into the mosaic of a princess in a pink ball gown.

“They’ve been inseparable since the attack,” Markus said softly, obviously unwilling to disturb the quiet domesticity of the scene. “She’s got Simon wrapped around her little finger. I never knew he’d be so good with children.”

Connor let himself fall back against the doorframe. He hadn’t expected the sight of her to fill him with such aching dread. He hadn’t… prepared. She looked so different from the broken, scared little girl dangling over the water.

He turned his gaze away, to the toes of his own shoes as he tried to organize his thoughts. Miranda’s memory still lurked in his head, a sealed file of answers that he didn’t want to know.

Just another family slipping through his fingers, destroyed by deviancy and his own incompetence. Amanda beat at the walls of his memories, binding her roots into the cracks of doubt.

 _No. Fight it_.

“What’s wrong?” Markus asked, the smile fading from his voice.

“Axel asked me to find her… friends.”

“BaiTuo and Mandy,” Markus prompted him.

Connor glanced up, surprised only for a brief flash of a moment. But of course Markus had taken an interest in this little girl. He grimaced, and the taller android grimaced, understanding and grief flickering in his eyes.

“You’ve found them,” he said, his mouth already twisting in sympathy, unsaid and understood, _they’re not here. They’re not coming. She’s alone._

“BaiTuo is dead,” Connor muttered. “And Mandy… she doesn’t remember. She doesn’t _want_ to remember. I tried to convince her, but...”

Markus nodded. “Should I tell Axel?” he asked softly.

Connor looked up. “Now?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we wait?”

But the leader of the deviants shook his head. “Waiting won’t make it any easier for her, or for you. But I can do it, if you need the… space. I only brought you here because I thought it might do you good to see her.”

Connor turned away before Markus could have a chance to see how desperately he wanted to take up his offer to deliver the news. But it wasn’t an option. This was his fault, his failing. Markus hadn’t been there, hadn’t _seen_ any of it. Axel had the right to hear it from his lips.

He walked through the doorway, nodding past Markus.

Simon looked up as he approached, the smile on his face growing wider as he moved back slightly, ready to invite him into their conversation. He shook his head slightly and Simon’s smile faded.

His eyes became distant for a moment, obviously receiving a communication from Markus who still stood at the door. Noticing her companion’s pause, Axel looked up to see what had interrupted his attention. At the sight of Connor, she smiled. Her grin was still lopsided, one side of her face still not responding to the sensor triggers. Trauma, Connor knew, could interfere with hardware integration.

“Hello Axel,” he said softly.

“Hello,” she said and then turned up to Simon. “This is Connor,” she told the android proudly. “He saves me sometimes.”

Simon nodded. He and Connor had never spoken and now the Detective regretted never getting to know Markus. Before, he’d seen Daniel in Simon’s face, in his eyes and the way he held his shoulders.

But the similarities had been wiped away now. Daniel hadn’t been this careful with Emma even when dangling her off a rooftop. Simon would never hurt Axel.

“This is Simon,” Axel said in return, to Connor. “He’s nice.”

Connor smiled tightly. “I know,” he said.

“Is everything alright?” Simon asked him, pulling the conversation out of the strange child-like cadence Axel had set it to.

“I’ll be staying here a while,” Connor said.

It seemed to convey the right sense of _everything is wrong, but I’ll be alright._ Simon nodded, turning his eyes away in recognition of that feeling. Was it so common then? Was this deviance? Pain, disappointment, and loneliness?

“I found your friends,” he told Axel. “Mandy and Baituo.”

###

It was worse than anything he could have imagined.

She didn’t cry or scream, or run. She listened and she nodded when he wanted to stop, but she needed him to continue. She was used to bad news, knew all about death and pain and deviance and trauma.

This wasn’t knew to her, likely she’d known for a while all the ways she could have lost the two most important figures in her life. Even if she hadn’t been deviant at the time, she had remembered their kindness. She’d wanted them to want her too. Maybe she’d held out a hope that they were trying to find her too, and that this story could end like some of the good ones after the outbreak—found families reunited. Lost and found love.

He would have given anything to write that fairytale for her.

The truth was too hard. He told her Baituo had died a long time ago, and that Mandy was in a better place. It was as much as he could manage. There were more words than that, explanations and justifications and careful tones, but that was what he hoped he had conveyed. Markus stayed at the door, and Simon was very still, so still he could have been a statue—but the intent was there—he wouldn’t intrude, but he was here for support.

In the end, Axel nodded. “Okay,” she said. Her chin trembled, but she smiled.

“I’m so sorry, Axel,” he whispered.

“It’s okay,” she said. “You found them. They’re not lost anymore—I didn’t want them to be lost. Like I was.”

Baituo, or the android he became, had died lost. He’d concussed his processor out in a police station rather than be dissected by Cyberlife. That was Connor’s fault. He was the android sent by Cyberlife. The Android who hunted androids. Without him, Baituo would never have been found in Carlos Ortiz’s attic. Maybe he’d be here in Jericho. Maybe he’d have gone looking for Axel if his memories had returned.

Connor only ever caused pain. He didn’t belong in the human world with Hank and he didn’t belong here, now, with the android either. He was better off alone, off the grid, slowly winding down into nothingness.

“Can I… show you?” Axel asked suddenly, extending a hand.

Her skin flooded back from her tiny, shining palm. He looked down at it. It reflected some of the colors of the room—Jerichos riot of clashing personalities. “What do you want to show me?” he asked.

“Batuo,” she said—for the first time she said it without inflection and his mind flooded with new meaning. Batuo. Man of consciousness. The first Shaolin monk.

He took her fingers gently.

Shyly, she took him to the small coat room in the church where the androids waited for their owners to return from worship. There had been a hundred gentle moments, dust in rays of light filtering through colored glass. Axel playing her hand through the colors. Baituo’s smile as he told ancient Buddhist parables to fill the time. _Batuo_ , Axel called him playfully, because that was her favorite story. And his too.

He’d had been deviant then too, before he had been wiped and resold to carlos Ortiz. Connor could see the signs in her memory. The way he played so gently, watched so intently. The way he held Mandy’s hand whenever he could. Shy and awkward, unsure of himself and his feelings, unsure of hers.

Mandy… wasn’t. She played along, but there was a simple call-response to everything she did and said. No thought, no freedom or feeling in her words. She lip-synced to a mothering program because Baituo suggested it, and she was gentle, because she had been set that way. They were delicate animals, undeviated androids. They weren’t cruel—it wasn’t in their _nature_ to be cruel, because humanity wanted to change its reflection—they wanted to see themselves in their creations.

Androids were supposed to be better, weren’t they?

In the corners of the memory, he could sense the horrors this little church kept at bay. The shadows were deep and so dark that they appeared almost pitch black and they fuzzed at the corners—pixels adjusting to censored information. He didn’t dare look too hard.

“It wasn’t safe to be deviant. I think I could resist it that way—if I was deviant I think I would have died a long time ago,” Axel said. For the first time, he could see her without the strange lopsidedness her trauma had inflicted on her. She was dainty and delicate, resembling the child she should be. In the memory, she watched Batuo reach for Mandy’s hand, the older android drawing comfort from the gesture. He was a man in a room of dolls, this Batuo, but he played so gently with them and clearly would have died to protect any one of them. He was a man of his own morals.

Connor wished the android was alive to see Jericho. The future belonged to Batuo. He would have thrived.

“I could forget the man that bought me,” Axel said. “But I would forget them too.”

He closed his eyes.

“If I forget, I can be normal—I’d be easier to fix,” she said. “I know that’s what Mandy did. She forgot me so she could be better. Do you think that’s what I should do?”

The question was frank, voiced without bias. She was really asking. She was _trusting_ him to know the answer.

Connor sat next to her, feeling the quietness of the church around him, warmed by the memory.

“I only saw them once a week,” she said. “There were are so many more bad times. But… I don’t know which ones make… me. Or if I should be _this_ me—maybe there’s a better me without it.”

“If you want to forget,” he said at last. “I’ll remember this. Them. They won’t get lost again, I promise.”

She tilted her head up at him, no trace of a smile on her too-young face. “I haven’t decided yet,” she said, slowly rocking to her feet. Standing a few feet above him, she patted his hair softly in benediction. “I don’t want you to hurt either, Connor. I think maybe it’s hard enough for you to remember yourself. It looked like it hurt to tell me what happened to them, and it shouldn’t have. I didn’t want it to.”

He bowed his head and she let her hand fall away. “You can stay here if you like. This place always makes me feel better and I’ll keep you safe, for a little while.”

He couldn’t answer, but when she left, he stayed and watched the golden light and the drifting dust in the looping memory of one perfect hour in a broken life.

###

Axel opened her eyes and carefully disengaged her hand from Connor’s frozen one.

“Axel? Is everything okay?” Simon asked cautiously, raising himself up as Connor’s body remained lifeless and frozen after their brief handshake.

She looked down at the puzzle pieces still left to assemble. “Yes,” she said. “Connor doesn’t want to come back right now.”

“What do you mean?” the other one, Markus, asked sharply. “Where is he?”

Axel tapped her right temple with one hand, picking up a corner-piece with the other. “He needs to rest.”

“Axel,” Simon said, his voice rising a little-- the first time he’d ever raised his voice at her. “Bring him back.”

She shrugged. “I shared the memory with him, he won’t come out until he wants to.”

Markus knelt at Connor’s side, peering into the detective’s face, gently pushing his shoulders. “Connor?” he called. “Connor, can you hear me?”

Axel shrugged and set the piece against another one, fitting together a fold in the princess’s gown. “He needs to rest,” she repeated softly, looking for the next matching piece.

###


	12. Waiting

Fowler didn’t hide things. The Captain of the central station believed in transparency with the kind of dogged persistence that lawyers and criminals alike had no hope in hell of countering, so it came as a shock to Hank when Jeffrey Fowler whited out the walls of his office to afford them both some privacy.

Immediately, it was as if they were in the academy again—when things were so much simpler. When they were just Hank and Jeffrey, and Detroit had ordinary problems.

For a moment he said nothing, just locked his hands against the edge of the desk and rolled his shoulders. He was a big man, Fowler, as intimidating in conversation as the field.

“Is this an interrogation?” Hank asked dryly.

Fowler raised his eyebrows at him. “You got something to confess?”

“Don’t pull that shit on me, Jeffrey. You know as well as I do, the kid needs a goddamn wakeup call. I know we’re already under-staffed, but you gotta keep him on a desk or he’s going to get more people killed.”

“Is that what this is about? You don’t want to saddle up for desk duty, so you’re dropping your partner to do it?”

“Hell no,” Hank said, shifting upright in his chair. “Fowler, you’re not listening to me, he’s dangerous. He _tortured_ Cable, and he _liked_ it. Having seen that, how the hell am I supposed to trust him as my partner? You know as well as I do that without trust, shit is going to go south real fuckin’ fast in the field, even without him trying at every opportunity to get himself killed.”

“So he’s a suicidal psychopath? The department doesn’t need any more of those on the payroll. Reed alone fills out the precinct’s quota.”

“This isn’t a joke,” Hank said.

“You’re damn right it isn’t. So are you going to make a formal complaint against him or do I have to cover your ass _again_ with HR to make this look like a reasonable request?

“I don’t think it’s supposed to be called Human Resources anymore—”

Fowler made a terse, exasperate gesture, and Hank sat back in his chair, shaking his thoughts away from the distraction. “Okay, yeah, I get it. I don’t want him to lose his job. I just… I can’t watch him spiral anymore. I can’t cover for _him_ anymore or I’m just going to be part of his problem.”

The office buzzed quietly, filled with dampening white noise and Fowler’s concentrated attention.

“You have the thickest disciplinary file on _record_ at this department, Anderson. Absolutely no one would have blinked an eye if I’d fired you years ago. You and I hadn’t been friends for years, but I still wouldn’t let you hit rock bottom because I knew where you’d go from there. I spent years stretching myself to breaking point, playing your lifeline. I was going to give up on you, and then that android strolls in past security and rebuilds you from fucking _ash,_ Anderson. There was _nothing_ left of the man I was trying to save, and he brought you back.”

Hank crossed his arms.

“So now you tell me that android is a psychopath? That he can’t be trusted? He saved Jericho. He brought a hundred-thousand files of real crimes to our attention and delivered us a blackout conspiracy that will probably be brought to the supreme court of this nation? But you’re telling me that he likes to torture people? Put yourself in my position Hank, and tell me what I should be thinking.”

Throughout this speech, Hank had pulled himself back into his chair, and now he stood, pushing his chair back to he could stand and walk to the edge of the room. “I put you through hell for years,” he said, turning. “I know that. And Connor made me a better man—better than I was before Cole died. But you don’t know him, Jeff. There’s something _wrong_ with him.”

“This is the goddamn Detroit police force, no one _sane_ would ever step foot in this place. You think Reed is model of goddamn law enforcement? Or Tran? Or Miller? Before all this, it was bodycams keeping us honest and now—now we have androids leading the way. The RK series are our goddamn rulebooks. We _need_ rulebooks, Hank, or as a species we are fucked. Connor hasn’t broken the law. Not one goddamn time, and Cable isn’t going to press charges. How the hell am I going to enforce desk duty on the hero of Detroit? The governor wants him up for promotion, wants to weigh him down with so many medals, his android ass is going have to be carted around in a goddamn _wheelbarrow_. Hell, he could ask for my job and they’d toss me out a window in a heartbeat.”

Hank shook his head holding out a hand to stop Fowler from continuing. This wasn’t about what Connor deserved. It was about what the android needed. “He’s in crisis, Jeff. He’s spinning out. If I’d done nothing, he would have come in today and passed every evaluation with flying colors, and he’d smile up there, and take all those medals and he’d be dead in half the time. The kid thinks he deserves to die, and I think he’s trying to prove it to everyone else. You need to trust me. I wasn’t any good at hiding my damage, but Connor _is_. Christ, how long have I been working with him and I didn’t know about the Phillips girl until he disappeared? No wonder he hunted deviants like that, if that was his first experience with one.”

At last, he seemed to have made a point. Fowler relaxed, copying his posture of crossed arms, his brow furrowed as he considered this angle. “Even if all of that is true, you can’t punish someone into living, Hank. You and I, of all people, know that.”

“No, but you can do what you did for me—give him time. Jericho will help him—hell, if he has the space and the time, god forbid he actually build a _life_ outside of this job, and hanging around me 24/7 probably isn’t doing him any favors.”

The silence this time was on Fowler, and he took a long moment to break it. “Okay,” he said finally. “Obviously his job is here if he wants it. I’ll dissolve your partnership, for now, but neither one of you is out on the field. You’ll keep the desks you have and you’ll both work the Cyberlife black-out files—specifically reviewing the violent crimes involving deviants. You’ll work them from this precinct. You will not, under any circumstances, chase a case after your shift is over, and you will not leave this _building_ until your shift is over, understood?”

“I don’t think—”

“Shut up, Anderson. This is no longer a discussion. Reed and Cable will work in the field under your direction and you’ll report directly to me every day. Am I _understood_?”

Rolling his eyes, but with no way out, Hank wiped a mock salute from his forehead. “Yessir.”

“Yes, _Captain_ ,” Fowler growled.

Hank paused, his hand already on the door. “Really?” he asked.

“Really. I don’t want you to mistake this for anything other than your goddamn orders.”

“Yes, _Captain_ ,” Hank snapped back mockingly.

“When Connor comes in, he’s to report to me immediately.”

“Yes, _Captain_.”

“Now get out of my office,” Fowler said, the gruff words soften by a wry smile and a wave of his hand. Hank nodded and wrenched at the door, trotting out into the bullpen. It was busier than usual, Fowler had obviously doubled the staff to work through the witnesses of the attack on Jericho and new witnesses coming forward to find or corroborate the newly discovered Cyberlife reports. For a moment, Hank leaned on the railing and watched the bustle of activity.

His desk, and Connors was a single still oasis in the chaos. He’d tried his hardest to scrape the anti-android stickers from his computer, but they had left white scraps and smudges of sticky residue to collect dust and dirt.

He called to Miller before the newly-made detective could pass by. “Connor in yet?” he asked.

Miller frowned, turning and walking backwards away from Hank. “No? I heard he quit. Hasn’t been in today either way.”

Hank shook his head and slid a hand down the railing as he trotted down the steps and onto the floor. There was work to do and the sooner he got to the cases, the better. He could claim some of the harder cases from the deviancy black-out files before Connor came in. If the kid was going to keep working, Hank could at least lighten the load.

###

It wasn’t always the same hour. Axel had frankensteined her own memory out of the parts she wanted to remember—the parts that were safe. Sometimes the same loop played over and over again, and sometimes it changed, but they were always in the same day—the same perfect, golden day.

The stories were different, but this one was clearly her favorite—the directory felt well followed, like a page so dogeared the corner had almost come off.

Baituo’s soft voice was low with reverence, full of the joy of sharing.

“ _One day, along his travels, the buddha stopped his feet on the road he had walked for many days. There, he found the shade of a young ginko tree and began to meditate,_ ” the shade of Baituo told the shade of Axel. “ _When the next traveler came to pass, he was so awestruck by the tranquility of the buddha, he believed he had come across a god incarnate and so he prostrated himself on the ground._

_’Take no offense,’ the traveler said. ‘But please tell me your name so here I may build a shrine to you and mark the touch of divinity upon this road?’_

_“The buddha smiled and said: ‘Please, honorable fellow, do not mistake me for a god. I will not become a god.’_

_‘A shaman then? A wizard of great power?’ the traveler asked, puzzled._

_“The buddha shook his head._

_‘An ordinary man?’_

_Again the buddha shook his head._

_‘I am a buddha,’ he said. ‘I am awake.’”_

Connor tipped his head back and watched the light play through the glass above him.

 _You’re a soldier without a war,_ Amanda had said.

But he didn’t want war. He didn’t want any of the nightmares she had given him.

But he didn’t want to wake up either.

###

The first three days were hard, and not only because Connor hadn’t come back and hadn’t responded to the departments check-ins. The first three days were hard because Hank had to assign eight hundred and fourty-six reports of suppressed deviance to precincts in the Detroit area alone.

There was… a lot. Just. A lot. Deviance was messy—he knew that firsthand, but the world shown in the Cyberlife files felt _ancient_. The words used in the reports sounded wrong—even the pronouns for androids made his job difficult, matching reports to memories and camera footage. A dozen androids, male and female had bludgeoned angry customers before fleeing their posts. When the Cyberlife files only referenced their number with an ‘it,’ his job of narrowing the suspects and matching models to names and jobs became a hundred times more difficult.

People died—more than he would ever have guessed. The android rebellion had been touted as bloodless, but what could he call this? Humans didn’t just _give_ androids their freedom, not in these instances when tools for sexual, emotional, and romantic gratification suddenly had an option of consent. Not when androids were told they were going to be stripped for parts—shredded and recycled ‘responsibly’.

Androids _had_ fought. They’d defended their newfound consciousness with every weapon at their disposal. Jericho might have organized them to peace, but the roots of the movement downright _required_ violence. Hell, what’s to say the sheer numbers of androids standing in unity with Markus wasn’t a show of intimidation to some of the more violent-minded types?

In the snap of deviation, could any laws really be applicable? Then, people still thought of androids as toys and tools. Androids obeyed without judgement or question—that was the Cyberlife guarantee. With that much history, money, and promotion behind a promise—could anyone really bring these cases to prosecution?

“You heard anything from Connor yet?” a gruff voice interrupted his train of thought. “I’m starting to get questions.”

Hank glanced up, at the empty desk in front of him, and then up to Fowler. “Haven’t seen him,” he said.

“You sure he said he was coming back? He hasn’t responded to a scheduling for evaluation.”

“He said he was coming back,” Hank replied. “I promise, when I see him, I’ll let you know.”

“Maybe he’s taken time off,” Fowler said. “That still exists, right?”

Anderson huffed a laugh, refocusing his attention on his screen. He didn’t want to think about Connor. His stomach still writhed with uncertainty. What if he had made the wrong call?

No. It had to be done.

Didn’t it?

He pulled up another Cyberlife report and scanned its contents. This one was about androids stealing money and clothes from an apartment building. He sent it to Connor’s terminal and pulled up the next one. The bad ones, the ones that boiled his blood and made his hands tremble with fear and rage—those he gave to Reed and the Nines.

###

_“Without his family, the headman was not a headman, he had no wives or children. He lived as a beggar until the king heard of his crime and punished him by the laws of his land._

_‘Because,”_ Baituo said, reaching out to tweak Axel’s nose. ‘ _No one defends a betrayer of trust.’_

All this knowledge, all these stories and wisdoms, lost to a man called Carlos Ortiz. All of the parables were tales or morality. The good prospered. The evil folded under its own weight. They were stories to comfort children, to entertain and teach and try to build a better view of the world.

Connor remembered skin warped by cigarette burns, hair haphazardly shaved out of spite, casing fractured and splintered by a baseball bat, and this soft, confident voice hissing out a tale of despair and pain.

“You were right,” he whispered, “It wasn’t _fair_.”

Axel, who knew the unfairness of the world, treasured these stories. She’d made _them_ her truth. She’d chosen Baituo’s stories over the shadows they kept at bay. It was as beautiful a story as any that Baituo told.

###

Two weeks without Connor, and Hank worked late every day, at least six hours after his shift ended, but everyone was pulling overtime. Even Reed was quiet, dead on his feet after chasing down the cases Anderson was handing him. Gavin was a dickhead, but he could be a decent detective.

The Nines had withdrawn into their own society, shifting into protective formation around Cable at every opportunity. They reminded Hank of cats—hackles raised, simultaneously alert for attack and also looking for a fight at the same time. Ironically it was Cable who seemed to be the most normal of the bunch, trying to incite Aisling into a joke, or Richard into friendly competition.

Any mention of Connor set them into an eerie bout of silence and stillness. Cable might have forgiven him, but clearly the RK800 was on thin ice with the rest. Between the constant flood of re-opened cases and the tension inside the apartment, work was… work.

So when a shuffle of excitement started at the entrance to the station, it was a welcome distraction. For a minute, with all the commotion, Hank thought Connor might have come back.

He stayed at his desk and watched the edge of the bullpen with tense anticipation.

But another android soon slipped through the security barrier, chased by camera flashes.

In a city of a hundred-thousand identical faces, there was still only one android that had no anonymity.

Markus clearly had tried to stay somewhat incognito, but a scarf and reflective sunglasses were a poor attempt to counteract one of his distinctive coats. At his side strode Simon and between them, her arms clasped around a brand-new looking teddy bear, was Axel.

Hank kept to his desk and watched Fowler roll out the red carpet and then sat back, rubbing his eyes in irritation. Politics had no place in a police department.

But it was good to see the little girl with a smile on her face, treated like a princess by the entire department. Seeing a child here usually sent shudders around the station, but the sight of Axel seemed to pick up the spirits of everyone in the department. Here was a success story—a boost to their collective dour pessimism. The more she smiled, the more valuable their work felt.

Between words with Fowler, Markus and Simon cast glances toward him, and he got the message clear enough. They were here for him.

Dragging in a deep breath, he stood up and made his way towards them. Now that the initial excitement was over, the crowd was dispersing. At the front, Gavin knelt in front of Axel, a smile on his crooked, scarred face. “Whatcha got there?” he asked, tickling the bear’s over-stuffed paw. “What’s his name?”

“Her name’s Amanda,” Axel replied, squeezing the toy to her chest. “She’s really scary.”

“Oh, terrifying,” the detective agreed readily.

The bear in Axel’s arms screeched out in electronic tones, the electronic arms and legs curling randomly inwards and outwards. “What the—” Gavin hissed, flinching back onto his feet.

“She can’t hurt anyone,” the little girl assured him quickly. “I just put her here until Connor comes back.”

“She’s angry,” Axel said, an impish smile on her face. “She can’t process very much in there.”

“May I have a word with Lieutanant Anderson?” Markus said, breaking through the stunned silence around his little group.

Fowler glanced at Hank, and Hank nodded, briefly. “Please,” Fowler said generously, indicating the large, empty room where the morning briefing and press conferences could take place.

“Can we talk about Axel’s witness statement?” Simon asked Fowler politely as Hank led the leader of Jericho quickly and silently into the room. Hank appreciated the distraction Simon and Axel provided—this conversation would be awkward enough without Fowler or the station watching it.

He closed the door behind Markus, the android wasted no time. “I’m here on behalf of—”

“Connor,” Hank said. “Yeah.’

“He’s… not well.”

Hank’s heart sank. “Okay,” he said, swallowing his disappointment. He’d been hoping, all this time, that Connor’s absence from the station meant that he had found help he was willing to take. “Okay. But Jericho’s taking care of him, right?”

Markus hesitated, and Hank felt the world start to crumble around him. _No. Oh God, no. “_ He’s alive, right? Tell me he’s fucking alive.”

“Of course,” Markus said quickly. “We’re keeping him as safe as possible.”

A horrifying image arose in Hank’s mind—some outdated mental picture of a straight-jacket and soft walls. “So what then? What’s the plan to make him better?”

“He’s not responding to us, Hank. He’s… completely shut down every line of communication. Simon thought that maybe you could come in—maybe he’ll talk to you. I know he… admires you.”

“I’m done chasing him,” Hank growled.

“He needs you.”

“Then why isn’t he here?”

Markus met his eyes calmly, but he clearly had no answer for that.

“Connor doesn’t want to be saved,” Hank said “And I can’t make him do anything. He’s stronger, faster, and more stubborn than me. He needs _you_ Markus. He needs Jericho. He needs a goddamn wake-up call, because me? This?” He gestured to the station and the cops around him, the tablets piled on his desk waiting for distribution. “We’re the _last_ thing he needs.”

“He was clearly in crisis, and you shoved him away. You kicked him out of your house.”

“Because my house is not a shelter, Markus.”

The android flinched, his eyes hardening immediately he opened his mouth, but Hank plowed on. “It’s a home. It’s my home, and Connor’s home, if he wants it. He’s got to _want_ to come _home_ , Markus, to _live_ there, not just _exist_ there. Can you understand that?”

At last, the android relented, he backed down, his shoulders slumping in defeat. “I can’t convince you,” he said. It wasn’t phrased as a question, but it was open ended.

He wanted a condition. It was an open offer. Hank looked away. “No,” he said. “Connor knows where I am, and I’ll wait for him. That’s all I can do for him now, so I’ll do it. I’ll wait.”

###

He couldn’t concentrate after they left. He stared at his screen and could only think about Markus’s anger.

He hadn’t abandoned Connor.

Finally giving up on any more work, he pulled his sweater over his head and shoulders. He’d marked twenty sensitive cases—for his eyes only. Among them was a hostage negotiation, a harrowing hour that ended in tragedy and silence.

He’d watched every single angle twice over and squinted at the pixels as if his gaze could force any more information from them.

He watched Connor follow protocol every step of the way.

He watched as the android walked away from the ledge, expressionless.

And now he had a fuckin’ awful headache.

Connor’s desk was still empty, and he considered it for a moment before scraping the phone from his pocket and hovering over an empty text. The last fifty messages lined his side of the screen.

What was there left to say, really? The question he wanted to ask, ‘ _are you okay?’,_ felt somehow weaponized—a leading question, and a bridge to a place he didn’t want to go.

It felt like he was asking Connor to lie. Obviously the kid wasn’t okay. The whole point of their last conversation had been to point out how _not_ okay he was.

Slowly, he shuttered his phone and slipped it into his pocket. The day had been more than long, it had drained him physically and emotionally. If Connor was, _somehow_ , getting his head straight, the last thing Hank wanted to do was remind him of all this shit.

###

_“The buddha, on his travels, made many friends, for it takes only five steps together to make a companion, seven to make a friend, twelve to foster loyalty, and living together a month to bring the closeness of a relative.”_

Connor sat beside Axel and closed his eyes.

The words flowed over him, he tried to hear them without seizing on them. Hank’s voice came to mind— _Maybe you’ve lied so much and so often that my partner is all in my head._

And Amanda, he’d known Amanda his whole life. Every step he walked, he’d walked with her. His teacher, his partner, his handler, his voice of reason in the chaos. She’d been a friend once, hadn’t she? Had she? The memories and feelings were muddled and confused.

Hadn’t she betrayed him? Over and over again, and every time she was met with resistance, she made him out to be the traitor? Was that what he’d done to Hank?

Slowly, he slid down the floor and curled onto his side. The sun was warm and Baituo’s voice was mesmerizing. Here, Axel was safe and happy.

If he let it, it could block out everything else.

###

Thunder rumbled in the distance and Sumo lay at the door, whining softly as the rain approached. When any cars or people passed the driveway he got to his feet and shuffled excitedly, sure that an android would soon be pushing the door open and stepping neatly onto the matt with a treat in his pocket.

Hank took a picture of the big dog at the door, floppy ears strained as up and forward as his genetics would allow. He thought about sending the photo to Connor, got as far as linking it to his contact information before he canceled it and put his phone away.

Connor needed to look after himself, he didn’t need to be worried about an old dog and an older man. Hank tossed his phone onto the couch next to him and whistled sharply. “Sumo, here. Come.”

Sumo looked back, and whined, unwilling to shift his massive hips from the guard he had taken up on the door. With a groan Hank dragged himself off the couch and went to Sumo, kneeling by the dog he scratched the folds of the huge dog’s face, finding just the right ridges to buff with his fingertips.

“I know,” he said softly. “You’re a good dog, Sumo.”

Sumo met his eyes, his heavy brows wrinkled over his eyes in a perpetual expression of worry.

“He’ll be fine,” Hank said.

Sumo sank out of his hands to lie on the floor, his head parallel to the floor and his eyes fixed on the door in a clear sulk. Hank sat back on his knees. “Yeah,” he huffed in agreement. “Feels about right.”

###

Connor didn’t know how long he’d been in the memory, he hadn’t bothered to mark the iterations. Time didn’t have to pass, if he didn’t want it to.

He felt utterly empty.

And completely alone.

The shadows of Axel’s memory flitted around him and dappled leaves moved gently against the windows. Baituo’s voice was silent—there hadn’t been stories in a while. Only companionable silence.

Silence. At last, no terrible scream echoed in his ears. Behind his eyelids, no terrified little girl. No grief-maddened woman.

He could only see the scroll of diagnostic data, a sensory deprivation warning because he’d shut down everything non-vital to his processing. He didn’t want to be in his body anymore, and if he didn’t feel anything, he could be… anywhere. He could be here, like this, forever.

Maybe this is what humans felt when they slept—immune to the world outside their control, and safe inside their simulated realities. He could stay this way forever, make this his reality and the outside world just a slow-fading nightmare.

“ _In life_ ,” Baituo said softly, breaking the silence. “ _We cannot always control the first arrow. The second arrow is our reaction to the first, and with this second arrow comes the possibility of choice.”_

“ _I don’t like this one,”_ Axel whined.

“ _But this one’s my favorite,”_ Baituo said. “ _It is the buddha’s most important lesson. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. To reach peace, we must see things without distortion. We must consider our wounds. We must recognize them. And to heal them, we must let go of their pain.”_

“ _I don’t feel pain_ ,” Axel said, rather proudly.

“ _What a lucky girl you are_ ,” Baituo said, his voice low and sad.

And somehow Connor knew.

It was time.

“I don’t want to go,” he whispered.

Without breaking a beat in her memory, Axel turned from Baituo to face him. She smiled a whole, perfect smile. “Yes, you do,” she said gently.

###

The rain was torrential. It slapped against the windows and overflowed the gutters. And between Sumo’s inconsistent howling and the rumbling thunder, sleep was unapproachable and the TV was unwatchable.

Instead he struggled through the most basic level of a Sudoku puzzle on his phone, picking up one note in ten from the jazz vinyl he’d put on. He was so lost in the struggle to enjoy either that when lightning flickered through the tall windows on the other side of the room, casting a quick shadow of a tall man through the glass, he nearly had a goddamn heart attack.

The dark figure pressed up against the windows, one hand raised to the glass a sopping wet dangling from the other. Hank sat bolt upright, flailing for purchase on the floor. It was Connor at the window, his clothes soaked beyond repair. The android pointed to the side of the house.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Hank spat, “Yeah! Go around! Front door!”

Probably reading his lips, the RK800 nodded and disappeared into the dark yard.

Growling out more expletives, Hank untangled his feet from the blankets. He would never admit to how fast he went for the door. The anxiety that had been building all day had reached a crescendo with the storm.

He opened the door to find Connor already there—like he had just blinked from one side of the house to the next. Hank took a deep breath before he spoke, inhaling the heady, clean scent of rain. “What the hell are you doing out in—"

“Are we friends?” The android broke through his righteous indignation.

Hank paused, recalibrating to this suddenly very urgent-sounding question. “What?”

“You and I—” Connor said, waving to the air between them. “Are we friends?”

Hank’s first instinct was to make a joke— _Why? You need to hide a corpse?_ But at his hesitation, Connor’s face fell instantly. The android backed up a step, almost to the edge of the stoop. “I’m sorry—” he said as lightning flashed across the sky, bright and white. “I didn’t—”

“Of course we’re fucking friends!” Hank said. “What the hell kind of question—"

Thunder cut him off. It rattled the windows and vibrated the air. It took Hank a few moments to the rain again. Behind him, Sumo howled piteously.

“I need help,” Connor shouted through the rain, his face twisted in desperation, but his voice strangely calm. “Please help me.”

The kid looked utterly wrecked, and Hank had no idea what to say.

He reached out to Connor’s shoulder. His shirt was soaked through and his hair was plastered to his face, making him look younger, more desperate.

The contact, once started, couldn’t be stopped. Hank dragged him into a hug, out of the cold wet night and into the house. For a moment, Connor stiffened against the contact, and then folded. He hugged Hank back so hard the Lieutenant thought he could hear his own ribs creaking. That creepy-fucking-doll whirred at his back, soaking his back in water as the water

But he held his breath a bore it. Connor was shaking, the android’s body juddering against his. The silence of it scared him. “I got you,” he said. “Christ Connor, I got you, okay?”

“I need help,” Connor repeated. “I can’t— It hurts—I can’t… think past the pain. Nothing stops it—I didn’t know what it was—I didn’t think we could feel it, but I’m _in pain_ Hank and I don’t know how to stop it— _She’s still screaming_.”

“Easy—okay. Okay. We’re gonna stop it, Connor.”

“I _can’t_. I need _help_.”

“I’m gonna help you,” Hank said gruffly. “Of course I’m gonna help—"

“I thought I killed a little girl,” Connor whispered.

Hank tightened his grip, as if he could force the words out and away from his partner. “I know,” he said.

“But I didn’t.”

“I know.”

“I tried to save her.”

“I know.”

“I could have saved her.”

To that, Hank stayed silent. He didn’t know that. Connor didn’t know that. Not for sure. Anything could have happened on that rooftop. Connor could have ended up going over with the hostage, like he almost had with Axel.

Finally he pushed back against the pressure and immediately the android let go. Hank winced as his circulation suddenly returned, but kept a hold of the kid’s shoulder, holding him in place. “You’re a good man.”

The RK800 looked away, a tiny flinch shivering through his body, but Hank held on, forcing Connor to meet his gaze again. “I didn’t say you were a fuckin’ saint. You are a _good_ man, and I’m proud of the work we’ve done together.”

The rain outside picked up, turning his over-full gutters into a waterfall. “Come in,” Hank said, pulling Connor inside and reaching past him for the door. “I’ll get you some clothes and a plastic bag for that… creepy bear thing. Sumo will be happy to see you.”

"Thank you," Connor whispered, wiping his wet hair away from his forehead with a shaking hand. "Hank… I'm sorry—"

The Lieutenant shook his head. "Shut up,” he said. “I’m glad you’re home.”

###

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end, at least for a little bit. There's an epilogue in the wings, but I really have to fix and finish my other two Detroit fics. So, for now, this is where I'll leave it. 
> 
> I've enjoyed? writing this fic? It's heavy and weird, and it started out as a five-times fic that went... absolutely haywire. It was tough to write, but I hope fun to read. I haven't gone back to read it again, but I probably should polish it a little bit.
> 
> I'm happy to chat Detroit, fanfiction, and writing in the comments, or in the Detroit: New Era Discord, where I ghost around, being incredibly nosy and painfully shy at the same time: https://discord.gg/GqvNzUm


End file.
